


nature has taught her creatures to hate

by thepolysyndetonaddictsupportgroup



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, But like make it hurt, Child Abuse, Child Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Danny Stoker Lives, Elias Bouchard Being a Bastard, Elias Bouchard Raises Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Elias tries to make a child avatar like Agnes Montague, Found Family, Gen, Jon is Very Tired, Jon is an avatar from childhood and deeply bitter about this fact, Jon pays for this fact for the rest of the fic, Kidnapping, Manipulation, Non-Linear Narrative, This is not a good thing, Trauma, this bad boy can fit so much trauma in it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:13:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28764621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepolysyndetonaddictsupportgroup/pseuds/thepolysyndetonaddictsupportgroup
Summary: The door to Mr. Spider's home closes, and Tommy Bradstaff disappears behind it, and the book does not.Jon picks it up.Or:Sometimes Jon wonders who he'd be if Gertrude had taken his Statement that day.
Relationships: Danny Stoker & Tim Stoker, Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Jonathan Sims & Martin Blackwood, Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 130
Kudos: 315





	1. the thing that is not tommy bradstaff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1995\. 
> 
> Jon picks up a book. Setting it down again is not quite as simple.

Tommy Bradstaff doesn’t scream when Mr. Spider takes him, and Jonathan Sims doesn’t run, and sometimes Jon wonders if either choosing differently would have changed anything. Had Tommy screamed, perhaps someone would have heard, someone who might have been able to help more than the eight year old complication-with-legs from Brixton Street, and had Jon ran, perhaps he wouldn’t have been there to see the legs reach out and pull him in, and perhaps he wouldn’t have seen the book tumble from his hands and thud dully against the pavement. Perhaps he wouldn’t have noticed any of it, and perhaps he would have never seen the book again. Perhaps someone else would have found it there, corner slightly dented from where it hit the ground, and they would have picked it up and taken it home, flipped through it perhaps, paused at the last page like Tommy had before them, pressed it against a door and raised it to knock—

It’s that last image that gets him, really. It’s the thought of those spindly legs that makes him do what he does. 

The book is there, gleaming dully in the lackluster sun, and it will eat whoever picks it up.

And so Jon picks it up.

He doesn’t want to, okay? He never wants to touch that book again. He hated it from the moment he saw it, and he hates it now, hates it with every burst of blood pounding through his weak-walled heart. He’s scared of the book, if he’s being perfectly honest. Of what it will do.

Except.

Except it ate Tommy Bradstaff. And it’s going to eat whoever reads it next. 

Only Jon knows not to read it, which is why, in a stunning moment of stupidity so common to those his age, he decides he must be the one to destroy it. 

He scuttles to the book, right up to where it lay by the blood-rusted door. He doesn’t pause to pick it up, barely even slows, just hangs his hands low and catches around the cover before he’s off again, sprinting as fast as his legs can carry him. He’s so scared of the door in that moment, of it opening, of the legs folding out and around him. 

But the door doesn’t open, and the legs don’t come. 

Jon sprints the whole way home. 

**~*~**

He doesn’t dare open the book again. He can barely bring himself to look at it.

When he gets home, he goes straight to the shed, where no one has been since his grandfather died. He takes the book and stacks a paint can on top of it, and then the tool box, and then anything else he can wrap his fingers around and add to the stack. 

He stacks for ten minutes, wrenches and screwdrivers and rakes assorted being added to the teetering monument to his fear, most of them tumbling to the ground directly after being added to the tower. He doesn’t care. He keeps stacking. 

Then, all at once, the fight goes out of him. He stumbles to the other side of the crowded, wooden room before curling up in a ball on the ground, watching the tower with a weary fear. 

(Tommy Bradstaff is dead, and Jon thinks it might just be his fault.)

He has to destroy the book. That much is obvious. He can’t let Mr. Spider get anyone else. The book must be a… door… of some sort. It must open some kind of horror dimension, where Mr. Spider waits to feed. 

He should burn it. Shouldn’t he? Burn the door, burn the way it gets through. That’d be enough, wouldn’t it?

Jon thinks of the door to his own house, of it burning, and he can’t help but think that it’d be so much easier to get inside or out if that door was gone. 

Does the door let Mr. Spider out? Or does it also keep him  _ in?  _

Jon barely makes it outside before he throws up. 

(Tommy hadn’t screamed when it took him. There hadn’t been time. But Jon wonders if it had hurt for long. He wonders if he had been afraid.)

Jon closes the door to the shed behind him, and makes sure it locks. It will keep for now.

He needs to figure out what to do. 

**~*~**

He makes a list. It reads:

Burn it. 

Bury it.

Freeze it in ice. 

Toss it into the ocean. 

Encase it in cement.

Burning it is out. He doesn’t know what that would do, if turning it to ash will make it better or worse. He’s too afraid to try. He thinks burying it might work, but he doesn’t know where he could put it without the risk of it being dug up again. He doesn’t think he could dig deep enough on his own to make it any real difficulty, and there are plenty of dogs and kids alike who like to dig. The ice stops making sense not long after he comes up with it--ice melts, after all, and he needs the book to be locked up for good. Perhaps the ocean would work, but he can’t exactly leave it near the shore. Waves might wash it up again, or divers might find a childrens’ board book encased in the muck, might bring it back up to the surface with them, might wonder what it says… 

He’d need a boat, at the very least. One that could take him to a point where the ocean is dark and deep, where he could put the book in a bag and fill it with rocks and then send it sailing down below. But he doesn’t know where he might possibly find a boat, or anyone willing to take him out. 

The last one is daft. He doesn’t even know where he might find cement. 

In the back of his mind, Jon can still feel the book in the shed. Waiting. Like a spider on a web. 

**~*~**

At dinner that night, Nan says that Tommy Bradstaff was supposed to come help her today, and he hadn’t, and it was so unlike such a responsible, punctual boy to not so much as ring. She says it in the pointed way that means she thinks Jon has something to do with it, that he’s somehow to blame. 

He doesn’t make it outside before he throws up, this time. 

**~*~**

Jon wakes to wet, cold grass beneath his feet and a sharp pain in his foot. 

It is night, and he’s in the back garden, moonlight on his skin and cobwebs in his hair. He had stepped on a rock, and it had sliced up the sole of his bare foot. 

The shed key is in his hand. He doesn’t have to wonder long how he might have gotten there, or what he might have been looking for. 

He doesn’t sleep again for the rest of the night. But when he’s pressed against the mattress that night, the door to his room locked firm, he thinks of the feel of the pages against his skin, the words sliding against his brain, the press of the covers beneath his palms. How… right it had felt. How wonderful the words had been, slick and smooth and horrible in his head. He wants the book, doesn’t he? He wants to knock. But… that can’t be right, he locked the book up, didn’t he? He ran from the door. Should he have ran? Shouldn’t he have knocked?

He wants so badly it hurts. 

**~*~**

The next day, Jon is feverish with fear and trembling like a leaf, and he looks just horrid enough that Nan doesn’t make even the slightest intimation that he’s faking to get the day off. Rather, she simply presses the back of her paper thin hand to his forehead and purses her lips before trailing off to call the school. 

After, she comes back to his bed with a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice. There’s something soft at the edges of her eyes, something close to concern, but her face has been carved in stone for so long that it can hardly make much of a fight. 

“I’m meant to go help out down at the library today,” she says, crisp and clear, in the way that Jon imagines his dad’s voice had sounded. “But if you’re not feeling well, I can call and--”

“No,” says Jon, just quickly enough for the softness to vanish. He wonders if it ever had been there at all. “I’ll be fine on my own. You go.”

(There’s a book in the shed. Jon can feel it, waiting. He thinks it’s still hungry.)

“Alright,” says Nan, and then Jon is alone again. 

He’s always alone, he can’t help but think. He wishes she had stayed. 

**~*~**

Jon finds himself trailing for the shed, key in hand, on four separate occasions throughout the day. He always snaps out of it before he ever gets close to the book itself, but on the last time, the key is already in the lock, and it’s about to turn. 

And when he pulls the key out, when he places it in his pocket once more, and sprints back to the house, there’s a momentary pange of anguish, of pain, a part of him  _ screaming  _ to go back and retrieve the book. He wants it, he wants it, he  _ needs  _ it, such things were meant to be read and consumed and consumed by. It should never be locked up. He shouldn’t have locked it up. It needs to be read. 

(He can’t let it stay in the house for a second longer.)

**~*~**

Jon’s hands hurt when he moves them, but he supposes that’s what happens when you wedge four thumbtacks in the places between your fingers. The pain is the point. 

It’s always pain that snaps him out of the book’s thrall--Tommy Bradstaff knocking him to the ground, the rock beneath his feet, a bee stinging him before the lock can turn--and it’s pain he needs to get rid of it. 

He built a box, while Nan was gone, and he’s decided to put the book inside. 

It’s hardly a box, really--it’s made of cardboard he found wedged in one of the drawers. He’s dotted it with thumbtacks, all facing out, and on the cover, he’s written  _ DO NOT OPEN  _ in sharp black letters. 

He’s going to put it somewhere no one can ever see it again. But he figures the warning doesn’t hurt. 

Blood rolls down the bottom of his wrist when he inserts the key into the lock, and his hands twinge with pain when he turns it. He’s grateful, though, because it means the cobwebs creeping along the edge of his vision burn away, and his head is mercifully, blessedly clear when he at last sees the book. 

There’s nothing on top of it. All of the things he stacked on top huddle at the other end of the shed, as if they, too, are afraid of what it might do.

Jon swallows. He twists his fingers, and the pain burns clear and bright. 

He tapes the book shut first, careful to make sure the cover doesn’t so much as crack open. Then, he places it within the cardboard, thumbtacks pricking along his palms and winning new droplets of blood from his skin. He tapes the box, too. 

Then, he puts it all in his bag, and he begins to walk. 

There are woods on the other end of town. Jon’s been there many times, though he doesn’t think he’ll ever go there again, once he’s done. It takes him the better part of an hour to walk there, and by the time he sees the first trees, the sky has opened above him, and the rain has started to pour.

It had been sunny, when he started his march. 

He walks for another hour before he’s deep enough that he thinks it’ll be safe, then stashes the book in the hollow of a tree. The hollow is hard to notice, and it hides the book completely. Jon doesn’t think it will be found, here. Not by anyone. 

On the walk home, he cries for the first time since Mum died.

**~*~**

Nan’s furious with him when he finally makes it back, and Jon takes it all with a tired kind of relief. By the end of it, he’s grounded for the next three months, school and home and nothing else, and don’t even think of having friends over young man--

Jon is tired, and he doesn’t mention the blood on his pin-cushion hands, or the redness in his eyes, or the way he hasn’t stopped shaking for hours, or the fact that he doesn’t have any friends to want over. Nan doesn’t either, but he hadn’t expected her to.

He’s sent to bed without supper, but that’s alright. He doesn’t think he could stomach the food anyway. 

**~*~**

Jon dreams of spiders that night, of webs around his limbs, of crawling, creeping blackness. He doesn’t scream when he’s awake but that’s only because he can’t find the breath, paralyzed beneath his covers. He can still see the stained-red white of the door, still hear Tommy Bradstaff’s gasp-before-a-scream, still see the limbs reaching out, out. 

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, curled against the mattress and waiting for dawn. The book is gone. That’s all that matters. The book is gone. 

There are creaks in the night, groans of a settling house, and Jon tells himself the book is gone. 

There are pauses in the silence, moments where he can feel the scream trying to claw its way up his swollen throat, and Jon tells himself the book is gone.

Tommy Bradstaff is dead, and it is the fault of no one but Jon, and Jon tells himself the book is gone. 

He’s so very afraid. The book is gone. He’s afraid. The book is gone. 

All that matters is that the book is gone.

**~*~**

The next day, there’s a knock on the door, twice and measured. 

It’s Tommy Bradstaff. He’s come to help Mrs. Sims. 

**~*~**

Tommy Bradstaff moves like a puppet jerked by strings, and Jon is the only one that notices. 

He sits at the table, barely moving from the sheer terror of it all, feeling the blood pulse from his heart to the tips of his fingers, down his legs, in his ears. He doesn’t know if he’s breathing. He doesn’t think he is. 

Nan gives him tea before she gives him any chores at all, tuts over his disappearance--she calls it that,  _ his disappearance,  _ and she has no idea how right she is--and brushes the cobwebs from his hair. 

“It’s from the Jones house,” says the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff, and it smiles. “They had me clean their shed for them.”

Its voice lingers on the word “shed.” Jon is the only one that notices that, either. 

Nan’s nose wrinkles at the mention of the Joneses. She never has liked Mr. Jones. Jon wonders if the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff knows that. 

It smiles at Jon from across the table, thin, just enough to reveal its broad, white teeth. Jon stares at it, and he does not smile back. 

(A spider crawls from the corner of his mouth, up his cheek, settles at the corner of his eye.)

“Well, Tommy, you’ll find no such filth here. I have a few things still left from the other day. If you’ll--”

Nan trails off, her words suspended in the air between them like they’re caught in a web. 

“I have to go to the store,” she declares, suddenly, standing. She doesn’t pick up her bag. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

(Nan went to the store yesterday.)

“Do you need anything, Tommy dear?”

“No, Mrs. Sims,” says the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff, and it’s still smiling, and it’s still watching Jon. “You just be off now.”

“Jon? Do you need anything?”

Jon can’t find his voice. He shakes his head, just barely. 

Nan doesn’t stop for her shoes before she walks out the door. She doesn’t get her coat. 

She doesn’t knock, either, and Jon can’t help but be grateful for that. 

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff does not speak for a long while after Nan has left. It just. Sits there. Watching Jon. 

His hands scuttle across the surface of the table, fingers tripping over themselves like the legs of a spider.

“You should be more careful with your things, Jon,” it says, eventually. “You seem to have a nasty habit of leaving them lying around.”

Jon cannot speak. 

“I found something in the woods,” it continues. “It belongs to you.”

Jon cannot speak. He shakes his head in mute terror.

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff looks at him sharply. “Belonging is important, Jon. Ownership is important. It counts. You cannot get rid of things so easily.”

“Get out,” Jon manages, his voice barely a croak. “I’ll--I’ll call the police.”

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest. “Of course, you don’t own the book. Mrs. Sims bought it. It belongs to her. She paid for it, paid for the cost, paid for the consequences. Perhaps I should return it to her instead--”

The threat is enough to break the fear gluing Jon to his spot, shatter it like glass, freeing him cleaner than any thumbtack could, and in a moment he’s rocketing to his feet, his chair screeching back. 

_ “Shut up!” _

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff grins, this time wide, and Jon can see the black emptiness waiting inside. Cobwebs cling to his teeth, to the back of his throat, down, down, down. 

“The Web isn’t so bad, Jon,” it says, and it stands, too. It walks towards him jerkily, like his limbs don’t fit, like they’re pulled by threads. “It already knows you. You already know it. It won’t hurt you, Jon.”

Jon trips backwards, heart pounding in his chest. His legs tremble. He doesn’t think it can make it to the door. 

“It won’t eat you. Not like it ate Tommy. It wants you, Jon. It likes the way your thoughts feel, so slippery, so hungry, so keen. It wants to keep you close, tangle you up, fill you up, keep you in its threads, forever, forever, forever.” And not-Tommy looks so earnest, in that moment, so sincere, like it hurts, wanting Jon. “You’re already so empty, Jon. So lonely. But the Web can make its home in you. It loves you so very much. It will never let you go.”

Jon’s throat is a cave in, an avalanche, a scream that never ends. He can’t breathe. 

He moves back, two steps for the thing’s one. It is between him and the door, though, and he runs out of space fast. 

The kitchen countertop cuts into the base of his spine. He can’t run any further. 

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff creeps to Jon’s side, leans over to whisper into his ear. 

(A spider falls from its open maw. It scuttles along the collar of Jon’s shirt, then slips and falls to the counter below.) 

“Come home, Jon,” it tells him, soft and earnest, and the words scuttle into his brain like spiders, all in a line. Its fingers wrap around his wrist, pins it to the countertop. “It will only hurt for a moment.” 

Jon shakes his head mutely. He can’t breathe. 

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff continues to whisper, continues to speak, and the words wrap around the edges of his vision like gossamer threads. It tells him of a million spiders, a million things to love him, to fill him up, to make him a home. It tells him how very ill of a fit Tommy was, how empty and hollow and  _ sick  _ Tommy feels, how it would have hollowed him out and left him to rot if it hadn’t needed to talk to Jon so very  _ badly.  _

Jon is so very clever, with such clear thoughts, nimble and quick like the scuttle of a spider’s legs. He was so very smart in his plans, in his resistance, and his clever little tricks with the tacks and the boards only made it love him more. But it’s enough of that now. Enough of the naughty resistance, the running, the fleeing from his rightful owner. It will love Jon forever, if he only comes home. It will tangle him up and hold him close and it will never let him go again, never never never. 

Come home, Jonathan Sims. Come home to the Web. 

Amidst the fear, amidst the words, amidst the cobwebs he can feel around his neck, Jon remembers something. There had been a slight tilt to his path when he ran, a plan half-formed, a reason he had angled himself towards that corner of the kitchen--

(Nan kept her knives here. And Jon was never, ever to touch.)

His free hand scrambles behind him. His hand wraps around a hard, wooden handle, and the knife leaves the block with a clumsy tug.

He buries in in the chest of the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff, his lunge nervous and weak, but it sinks in without any trouble at all, as if Tommy were empty and there’s nothing to stop it from slicing deep. 

He pulls it out. Buries it in again. 

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff watches him with a puzzled smile. It doesn’t so much as flinch. 

So Jon pulls it out, and he uses it to slash at its wrist. 

The skin severs easily, weekly, like wet paper torn. Inside, Jon can see empty blackness and empty cobwebs.

But the hand releases. And Jon runs. 

As he sprints on the door, feet bare and heart rattling his ribs, the thing that used to be Tommy Bradstaff calls after him, and it tells him it will be waiting for him in Jon’s new home. 

**~*~**

Jon goes back to the house less than an hour after he flees it, not because he wants to, but because the thought of Nan coming home to find it waiting for her makes him sick inside. He’s crying as he walks through the open door, shaking in fear, but deep inside, he knows it’s foolish to worry. 

He already knows where it is, after all. It’s waiting for Jon on the other side of a white-red door. 

The house is empty, neither Tommy nor Nan anywhere to be seen, but Jon can feel the book waiting for him in his room. 

He walks up the stairs, tugged, compelled, like a puppet on strings. His bedroom door is open. He knows the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff opened it. 

Inside, it’s covered in cobwebs, from the ceiling to the floor. On his bed there sits a box, studded with thumbtacks and bound in tape. 

~~**_DO NOT_ ** ~~ **_OPEN_ ** **_ME JON_ **

The thumbtacks dig into his palms as he picks the package up. He swallows, and watches the blood drip on the corner. 

Then, calm as anything, he places it in his backpack, slings it over his shoulder, and walks out the door. 

**~*~**

The year is 1995, and there has been no leak of secured files, and the Magnus Institute is not yet known as the trusted haven for lunatics and liars. There is no ridicule. No disdain. No emotions towards it at all, really, and hardly anyone knows its name. 

The year is 1995, and Jon is eight, and he has always loved reading, because he once had a mum who loved it as much as him. She used to hold his hand as they browsed book shelves, used to push them between his open palms, used to sit with him tucked to her chest, reading him books that never ate a soul. She never got mad at him for his picky taste in books. She had always just laughed, and called him clever, and told him she loved him a thousand shining stars, a thousand cups of cocoa, a thousand kisses, a thousand hugs. Jon misses her laugh. He misses her telling him she loved him. He hasn’t heard anyone say it in so long. 

Sometimes, it hurts, how much he misses her. It had always been the two of them, musketeers without any need of a third. 

He thinks the Web had been right when it called him empty. He thinks he’s been empty for a long time. But he’s so very afraid of what it means to be filled up. 

The year is 1995, and it has been two years since Mum laid a newspaper out in front of him, let him nose through the adverts to find words he didn’t know. He was six but he still remembers it, remembers the feel of the paper beneath his fingers, the slightly dirty tinge of the ink, the sunshine on her hair, the clean, brisk smell of the wind drifting through the open window. He remembers one of the adverts, so odd, so out of place amongst the plumbers and the cleaners and the restaurants. He remembers what it said. 

Have you experienced something

unexplainable? Do you believe you’ve 

been touched by the supernatural?

Give your statement. 

The Magnus Institute, Research Center of the 

Paranormal and Supernatural. London. 

**~*~**

Nobody pays Jon much mind on the train into London, despite the ashen hue to his face or the pushpins crammed between his fingers, despite how he jumps whenever someone comes close or how he started shaking as the train pulled out and hasn’t stopped since. He’d like to think it’s the book ensconced in his bag, the danger of it radiating out and warning others off they way it didn’t warn Jon, but he knows in truth that they probably just don’t care. 

Jon took the money from the emergency stash, and he didn’t tell Nan before he did it. He couldn’t, of course, not with her having shambled down the road with no shoes or coat to speak of. He hopes she’s okay. He hopes one of the neighbors found her. 

(He hopes Tommy Bradstaff didn’t.)

Nan’s going to be fine, Jon thinks, pressing the pushpin firmer between his fingers just for the prick of pain it brings. The… Web…. didn’t want her; it wants Jon. And Jon’s gone, which means it won’t be waiting around his house. He’ll go to the Institute, and he’ll tell them about it all, the book and the spiders and dead, dead Tommy Bradstaff, and they’ll help him. They’ll save him. 

“I’m afraid that statements are part of our Archivist’s duty,” says the lady at the reception, smiling sweetly, but she eyes his bloodied hands with a hesitant look, “and she’s away at the moment. You can write your statement down, though, and when she returns, we’ll be able to look into it.”

“I…” Jon feels cold. Jon feels sick. Jon feels…. Afraid. “What?”

“She’s not here, dear,” says the receptionist, almost apologetic, and she keeps looking at Jon’s hands like she wants to mention them, but she  _ doesn’t,  _ adults  _ never do,  _ they just look and look at the blood and the bruises and they  _ pretend not to see them.  _ “If you leave your name, statement, and number, we can get back to you in the next few days--”

“A few- _ -I don’t have a few days!” _

The woman frowns at him. “There’s no need to be rowdy.”

Jon sucks in a breath, and he’s so afraid, he’s so afraid, he can’t breathe he’s so afraid. “I--In a few days I’m going to be--” Dead. Not dead. Worse than dead. A home to spiders. He doesn’t know. He’s frightened. “I need to talk to someone  _ now,  _ and I mean right now. Aren’t you all supposed to help people?”

The woman looks at him pityingly. “Your friends give you a spook, dear?”

“I… beg your pardon?”

“We get a lot of boys and girls your age because of it. They’re just teasing, dear. It wasn’t real.”

_ “It wasn’t--”  _ Jon’s going to die, they’re not going to listen and he’s going to die, Tommy Bradstaff will drag him through Mr. Spider’s front door even if Jon doesn’t give into the book and walk through himself, and this woman is going to be smiling  _ the whole damn time.  _ “This isn’t about a prank--or  _ teasing  _ or, or--I found a book,  _ and it’s going to kill me.  _ It’s already killed someone else!  _ I can’t wait for a few days!” _

And the woman just. Sighs. Like he’s making things more difficult than it needs to be. 

She cranes a look around him, towards the lean, tall man walking down the hall, book in hand. “Elias, could you come give me a hand?”

“I--no, please, you have to help me, please I--”

The man moves next to them smoothly, smile already working its way onto his face. Jon thinks it’s meant to be soothing, probably, but the way he is now, it only serves to frustrate him further. “Of course we’ll help you,” he says, reassuring. “But how about we start with helping you find your mum, okay?” He glances up at the woman. “What’s the problem, Abigail?”

Abigail heaves a sigh. “A book he read frightened him.”

Elias nods, considerate, like it’s exactly as he expected. He smells funny, Jon thinks. Like smoke, but an odd sort. He doesn’t like the smell. “Books can be frightening at times. Why don’t you tell us the title, and we’ll hunt down a copy?”

Jon hates them terribly in that moment. He wants to scream. 

“It’s  _ not--”  _ He groans. “The story isn’t the problem here.”

Elias opens his mouth, begins to speak, but then:

“A book, you said?”

Jon jumps, because he’s jumped at everything since Mr. Spider opened his door. 

There’s a man in the doorway of the main foyer, brow raised in curiosity. He’s old, a bit weathered, a bit wrinkled, with a thick beard and sharp, clear eyes. He takes broad, clean steps towards Jon, quick and measured, then glances down at his hands. 

He frowns, kneeling before him. Before Jon can stop him, he takes his left hand in his own, carefully pulling out the pin between his middle and ring finger. 

“Did you do this to yourself?”

“I--” Jon stammers. “I had to. The book--it--I kept wanting to open it. Trying to. Even when I knew better.”

“This book that kills people?”

“I--yeah. Eats them. Or, well, the thing inside it does. It just. Lets it out, I think.”

“Mr. Wright, I don’t think--”

Mr. Wright smiles warmly. “I’ll handle this, Abigail.” He turns back to Jon. “This book, did you bring it with you?”

Shaking, Jon pulls the box out of his bag, and he doesn’t mind the pins as he does. 

~~**_DO NOT_ ** ~~ **_OPEN_ ** **_ME JON_ **

Mr. Wright accepts it with interest, careful to avoid the tacks. “Did you do this?”

“I--wanted to get rid of it. Tried to.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I did. Something brought it back.” His heart hammers in his chest. “Will you help me?”

Mr. Wright smiles at Jon, and it almost makes him believe that everything will be alright. 

Then, he tears the box open in a swift, clean movement. 

_ “You can’t!”  _ cries Jon, lunging forward. “It’ll--you’ll read it, it’ll make you knock--”

“Hm. A child’s book. A Guest for Mr. Spider,” reads Mr. Wright, regarding the cover with a clinical interest. Jon wants to rip it from his hands. He wants to open it up for himself, swallow the words whole, consume the book until it consumes him. Mr. Wright breaks the tape binding it with a sharp fingernail, flipping open the front. “From the library of Jurgen Leitner.” 

A jolt goes through the room, through Abigail and Elias, through Jon. When he looks at the receptionist’s face again, it’s stricken. 

“Sir, I never thought--”

Mr. Wright hummed. “I suppose you didn’t. We’ll speak later, Abigail. Get me someone from Artifacts Storage. Someone with a good, strong box.” He turns to Jon. “I suppose you know what it does?”

“I--” Jon nods. “There’s a door. And. Legs. Mr. Spider, he--does that mean you believe me?”

“Of course I do, Jonathan,” says Mr. Wright. “You’ve been very smart to come here today. If you follow me, I’ll take your statement.”

Jon’s heart leaps in his throat. “You’ll help me?”

Mr. Wright says, “Right downstairs, Jonathan. Everything worthwhile happens in the Archives. It’s the soul of the Institute, really.” He turns to Elias. “Elias, would you show him the way? I have to see the book is delivered safely to Artifacts. I’d hate to lose someone to a Leitner.”

Elias nods, moving between Jon and Mr. Wright--no, Jon and the book. Or both. He places himself between them like a shield. “Of course, Mr. Wright.”

“I did tell you to call me James, Elias.” He nods to them both. “I’ll be down in just a moment. A first aid kit for our friends’ hands, perhaps? And Abigail, if you might come down to my office at the end of the day.”

Abigail swallows, her face looking pinched. “Of course, sir.”

“Excellent. It won’t be a moment, Jonathan.”

“I… alright.” Jon nods. “Thank you.”

“Are you parents with you here today?”

“I, no, my Nan, she--” The words die in his throat. “No one will notice I’m gone, really.” 

Mr. Wright takes this in with an even nod. “Off you go, then.”

And Jon does, all the way down, until the chill gloom of the Archives has swallowed him up. Elias sets him up at a table, and offers him some water, and takes Jon’s hands in his own to pull the remaining pins out. He sets about cleaning them with medical wipes, then wrapping them in thick white gauze.

“Why did you put pins in your hand?” he says, as he adds tape to the junction of Jon’s wrist. 

Shrugging, Jon pulls his hands back, cradling them close to his chest. “I… wanted to open the book. Even after… what it did.” He studies the bandages with a careful interest. His voice drops until it’s barely there. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything so bad.”

Elias regards him carefully. “Must have been frightening,” he says eventually. 

Jon doesn’t answer. He looks back at the shelves

“Everything alright?” prompts Elias.

Jon jolts. “I--sorry.” He cranes around in his chair. “Is anyone else here, do you know?”

Elias raises an eyebrow. “With Gertrude gone? I very much doubt anyone would dare. She’s like a rabid hyena with this place. No one’s allowed in when she’s not here--Mr. Wright being an exception, of course.”

Jon doesn’t see. He doesn’t know who Gertrude is. He itches, deep inside, looking at those shelves. “I… just thought someone was watching me, is all.”

He sits at a table while Elias sets up a tape recorder, and taps his fingers, and stares at the shelves. He gets an odd feeling, staring at those shelves. Like he’s looking in the mouth of a cave. Like he wants to climb inside. 

“You’ve had a large scare,” says Elias. “Do you have your folks’ number? Anyone I can call?”

Jon thinks of Nan, of Tommy sitting at the table. His head hurts. “I’m worried that--”

“That will be all, Elias,” says Mr. Wright. 

Elias jolts. “Of course,” he says, blinking. “I was just about to get our friend’s contact information here--”

“I’ll handle that. You may leave now.”

Nodding, Elias says, “Yes, sir.” He smiles at Jon in a way Jon thinks is meant to be comforting. “Come find me before you go, okay? You can wait with me until your parents get here. You shouldn’t be heading off alone.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Elias,” says Mr. Wright, taking his place in the chair across from Jon. He sets a tape recorder on the table, then waits for Elias to leave before he presses the button. Jon wishes he had stayed, but he doesn’t say it. “Right then. Statement of Jonathan Sims regarding his encounter with the book ‘A Guest for Mr. Spider.’ Statement taken directly from subject, the seventh of January, 1995. Statement begins.”

He nods to Jon.

“I--” Those eyes watch him from the stacks, watch him shift, watch him squirm, those awful eyes he cannot see. A part of him wants to stare back. “I don’t like reading things that I feel I’ve already read before. It’s like, after the first, it feels like I’ve already crawled inside their minds and learned all they have to say. I like reading, but I like reading  _ new  _ things. My mum always said it was good, said I was curious, but Nan, she thinks I just like to be difficult. She found the book in a charity shop, and the second I saw it, I knew I hated it…”

**~*~**

Mr. Wright lets the tape recorder run after Jon’s words have already run dry. He stares at him from the other end of the table, silent, watching. 

Jon shifts uneasily. “So. Do you believe me?”

A beat. And then:

“Oh, it’s hardly a matter of belief, Jonathan. Do you believe in fate?”

Jon blinks. “Like… I was meant to find the book?”

“The Web certainly seems to think so. What say you?”

“I…” This doesn’t feel right, somehow, doesn’t feel like this is how the conversation is meant to go, but Jon feels himself slipping further down it’s spiral anyway. The words had flowed out of him methodically, rhythmically, like he was always meant to say them. He doesn’t want to stop. “I say I don’t want to be a mobile home for cobwebs.”

Mr. Wright smirks. “I suppose not, no.”

“Are… you going to help me?” Jon shifts in his seat, and he realizes he never heard anyone say anything about help, not upstairs, not in the ad. Just research. Just a statement. “Tommy Bradstaff, he’s probably still in my neighborhood. He’ll be mad when I don’t knock.”

“Yes, he is a dilemma.” Mr. Wright hums again. “Not a very large one though. These temporary hosts never last very long. Don’t hold together very well.”

Dimly, Jon thinks he should get up and leave in the same way he once thought he should stop reading that book. He thinks he’s afraid in the same way he was afraid when he saw that final page, though he does not know why. 

“I--” He cranes in his chair. “Are you sure there’s no one here?”

“There’s you and there’s me,” Mr. Wright tells him, evenly, and those eyes are still  _ staring.  _ “Who else could there be?”

“Someone’s watching me,” insists Jon. 

Mr. Wright cocks his head. “Do you think what happened to you could have happened to anyone, Jon?”

“What does this have to do with  _ anything?”  _ Mr. Wright does not answer. Jon huffs. “Anyone who read it, I suppose. What does it matter?”

“Anyone can act as spider food, that’s true,” acknowledges Mr. Wright, like he’s discussing the weather. “Your Tommy Bradstaff proves that well enough. But do you think the Web would have pursued anyone, Jonathan?”

“I… don’t recall ever telling you my name.”

“There are special people in this world, Jonathan, I truly do believe it. People above the rest. I think you’ve been noticed as one.”

Something horrible worms itself into his stomach. His palms itch. The shelves watch. “I… should go. My Nan is going to be wondering where I am.”

“No she’s not. You said it yourself: No one will miss you for hours.”

Jon pushes his chair back with a screech. His heart beats furiously, and he’s still not absolutely certain as to why. “I think I want to go now. Please.”

“Oh, that’s hardly safe. The Web’s likely been waiting for you since the moment you walked through these doors. You might not even make it to the train station before it moved.”

“I…” Jon falters. “Someone’s watching, aren’t they?”

Carefully, calmly, Mr. Wright reaches his hand in his pocket and digs something out. Jon can’t see it, the thing in his fist, but he knows there’s something inside, something terrible. He hates it in the same way he hated the book. 

“I’d like to make a deal with you, Jonathan.” He opens his hand then, palm up, to reveal an entirely ordinary coin, silver and shining. “Call the toss.”

Just barely, Jon shakes his head. He stares at that coin, that hand, and he feels like he’s staring down at a long, hard drop, and  _ he doesn’t know why. _ “I... don’t want to.”

“Call the toss,” repeats Mr. Wright, like Jon hadn’t even spoken. “And if you win it, I’ll save you from the Web.”

“I--” Jon falters. “That… thing won’t get me?”

Mr. Wright smiles thinly. “You have my word.”

“Heads, then.” 

And the coin flips. Over and up. End over end. 

Mr. Wright does not look at it when he catches it. He just closes his hand over it and stands. “Follow me, Jon. I’ll show you the way out.”

Jon’s breath catches in his throat. He doesn’t know if he’s relieved or not. He thinks he just feels sick. He gets up to follow, then stumbles briefly. His vision blurs, and Jon blinks. 

“Everything alright?” says Mr. Wright. 

Jon blinks again, then frowns. He must have gotten turned around when he stumbled. He could have sworn that he was facing the other half of the archives. He turns around, back the right way.

Shaking his head, he follows Mr. Wright past the stacks, through the shelves, back, back, back, right to the door which leads to the staircase which leads to the main lobby. They followed the exact path Elias had led Jon through when he first came, step for step. Jon is certain of it. The door that Mr. Wright opens is the door to the stairwell. The door that Jon walks through leads to the stairs. He sees them as he walks through.

Which is why Jon… can’t really explain why, a moment later, the image of the stairs melts away, only to be replaced by a clean, tidy old room with a desk and a stack of files and a cot in the corner. 

“Hm, this isn’t an ideal place for you,” says Mr. Wright, idly thoughtful. “But it will have to do until I can make proper arrangements. Gertrude won’t be back for a few days, luckily, so you won’t be bothered here.”

Jon turns just in time to see the door swing shut. 

_ “Mr. Wright!” _

(The door locks.)

**~*~**

Mr. Wright does not come back. Not for a long time. 

Jon doesn’t know exactly how long, because there isn’t a clock in the Head Archivist’s office. There’s a name plate--Gertrude Robinson--and a set of drawers filled with meaningless baubles--a fistful of paperclips, a flashlight, some blank pages and old tapes--and an iron-cast set of keys that do not open the door of the room he’s trapped in. There aren’t any windows, either, and there’s no way to tell if it’s been two hours or two days since Mr. Wright locked him in here. 

Jon has been in the office long enough to scream himself hoarse calling for help. Long enough to beat his fists bloody against the door. Long enough to wonder if Tommy Bradstaff has killed Nan yet, or if he’s still waiting for Jon to kill himself first. Long enough to curl up on the carpet in despair and cry himself to sleep. 

When he wakes, Mr. Wright is there. Sitting in the armchair across. Watching him.

“Sleeping on the floor when there’s a perfectly good cot in the room? Honestly, Jonathan. Have a little decorum.”

Slowly, Jon sits up. The carpet clings to his cheek painfully as he rises, pulling at the imprints in his skin. He scoots back against the wall. 

Mr. Wright raises an eyebrow expectantly.

Jon licks his lips. “I want to go home.”

Mr. Wright looks disappointed, pursing his lips like Jon had asked the wrong thing. “That’s hardly likely, now is it?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You won the toss. Congratulations.”

Jon’s mouth goes dry. “You said you’d help me.”

“I said I’d protect you from the Web’s puppet. He’s hardly likely to feed you to Mr. Spider here, now is he?”

“You can’t keep me in here forever.”

“No,” allows Mr. Wright, inclining his head slightly. “Though I had hardly been planning to.” 

“What are you going to do to me?”

Mr. Wright ignores him. “I brought you food. Not much in lieu of a proper meal, I’m afraid, but you’ll survive.”

There is an apple and a protein bar on the table, with a water bottle besides. Jon doesn’t so much as look at them. 

“People are going to come down here,” he says, with a bravado he doesn’t feel. “They’ll find me.” 

“Let me worry about that, Jonathan,” says Mr. Wright, and he stands. “I’ll be back in a few hours with your dinner. Try not to get into any trouble.”

Stumbling, Jon tries to stand, but his legs collapse from under him like a half-broken folding table. “Wait,  _ please--” _

(The door locks.)

**~*~**

He comes back with a cold cheese sandwich, an apple, and some water, and he still does not let Jon out.

Jon is waiting for him, that time, tucked against the frame of the door and waiting for it to open. When it finally does, he almost doesn’t realize, and his surprise costs him a good few seconds. 

That’s too much, as it turns out. 

Mr. Wright catches him easily when Jon tries to dart through the crack, tossing him back with a strength surprising for his age. Jon’s back hits the floor, and the wind goes out of him, and Mr. Wright watches it all with a calm, appraising look. 

“That wasn’t very smart,” he tells him, evenly, “now was it?” 

Jon scrambles back.

Sighing, Mr. Wright steps inside, shutting the door behind him. The lock snaps closed cleanly. Jon flinches at the noise.

“I think it’s time we set some ground rules,” says Mr. Wright, settling the food on the desk beside its uneaten counterparts before he strides to the other end, seating himself solidly in Gertrude Robinson’s chair. He gestures to the chair opposite. 

Jon doesn’t move.

Mr. Wright’s voice turns sharp. “You’re not an animal, Jonathan. Get off of the floor.”

Jon turns red despite himself. He stands, then, after a moment, settles himself on the edge of the chair.

“Eat your food, Jonathan.”

“I’m not hungry,” lies Jon.

Mr. Wright smiles humorlessly. “We’ve arrived at rule number one, then. When I tell you to do something,  _ you do it.” _

Jon swallows. He still does not reach for the food.

Mr. Wright moves to stand. 

Shaking, Jon snatches the apple out from before him. He takes a small, tentative bite, his teeth barely breaking the bright red skin, before he drops his hand and the apple alike back to his lap.

“All of it,” says Mr. Wright, and he watches as Jon takes in every last bit, apple, sandwich, and water alike. 

Jon feels vaguely ill as he settles back in his chair. The food sits in his stomach like a rock. He didn’t like having to eat it, and he doesn’t like the way Mr. Wright is still watching him.

“Good boy, Jonathan,” says Mr. Wright, warmly, and something twists unpleasantly in Jon’s gut. “Rule number two. Do not try to go anywhere I do not say first. We wouldn’t want you getting hurt, now would we?”

Jon swallows. “Are you going to hurt me?”

“I’m sure I won’t have to.”

Tears push at the back of Jon’s eyes. Something hot and thick lodges itself in his throat. He swallows it back. 

“Now, there’s something I want you to do for me,” says Mr. Wright, calm and understanding, “and if you do it, I won’t hurt you. Do you understand?”

Jon nods shakily. 

“Good boy,” says Mr. Wright again, but the words sound bitter to Jon’s ears, and he hates them, he hates  _ him.  _ He wants to go home. Mr. Wright slides a thin manila folder across the table, then settles a tape recorder between them. It turns on without anyone pressing the button. “I want you to read it for me.”

“I--” Jon blinks “--what?”

“I do not enjoy repeating myself, Jonathan.”

Jon swallows. He opens the folder. Skims it. It’s a statement, one of the Institute’s. It’s yellowed, with odd brown stains, and it tells the story of an old soldier who cheated death but didn’t live. “I--just read it?”

“Now, Jonathan.”

There’s a sharpness in Mr. Wright’s voice. Jon hurriedly picks up the papers. 

“‘Are you interested in folk tales at all? I know I’m--’”

“Stop.”

Jon freezes. 

“That’s hardly a proper introduction, now is it? We don’t have any information about who’s talking. We don’t know who is recording, or what your position within the Institute is. We don’t have the slightest idea why they gave the statement. Anyone who wanted to look back on it would have to listen to the whole thing to know if it had even the slightest relevance to the matter of their research, and that’s hardly productive. Start again. Give us the raw details of the case first.”

“I--” Jon sets the pages down again, his heart beating fast. _ “What?” _

“What did I say about--”

“You  _ kidnapped  _ me.”

Jon’s chest heaves. He grips the page between tight, white fingers, panic clawing at his throat as he watches the paper crinkle in his grasp. It pulls, taunt, and Jon can see thin tears begin to form where his fingers dig at the page. 

Mr. Wright’s jaw sets hard in his face. “I would suggest you calm yourself, Jonathan.”

Jon’s mouth twists into something awful, and his ragged breaths quicken before calming all at once. He slams the page back against the desk’s surface.

“ _ Fine _ \--I--Statement recorded by Jonathan Sims,  _ captive _ of the Magnus Institute, who--who’s locked up in a dusty old office by Mr. Wright and--and--he’s  _ crazy  _ and I want to go  _ home--” _

Mr. Wright hits him. 

Jon hadn’t been expecting it, not really, though perhaps he should have. He was kidnapped, after all. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Mr. Wright was willing to hurt him. 

The hit is enough to send him tumbling off his chair, though not enough to do any real damage. His jaw aches something fierce and Jon knows there will be a bruise, but he’s broken bones before and this isn’t one. 

It hurts, though, and the spiraling panic that had been circulating through Jon’s brain since Mr. Wright first locked the door starts to shudder through his mind. God--unless Jon escapes, he’s going to hurt him, if not kill him, and even if Jon escapes then Tommy Bradstaff is waiting for him outside the Institute walls. Jon’s… Jon’s going to die soon. And it’s going to hurt. 

He doesn’t realize the exact moment he starts crying. One moment he’s on the ground and the next there’s hot tears spilling down his face, and his chest is heaving, and he can’t stop them again. He wants to calm down but he  _ can’t,  _ not with Mr. Wright  _ watching  _ him like that.

Mr. Wright keeps watching him. Right up until the tears run out. 

“Calmed down now, have we?” he says, lightly, as if nothing had been truly wrong. “Is your little tantrum over?”

Cheeks burning, Jon nods, then picks himself off the ground and slides back into the chair. He doesn’t meet Mr. Wright’s eyes. 

“Good. Start again.”

Jon licks his lips, and his tongue tastes of iron. He looks at the papers and the words begin to pass through his parted lips, one after another, as if they were pulled out on a hook. “Statement of Nathaniel Thorpe, regarding… his own mortality. Original statement given June 4th, 1972. Recording by Jonathan Sims, the, um, just… Jon Sims, I suppose. 

“Statement begins.”

**~*~**

Mr. Wright is smiling at him by the end of it, that thin-lipped, creepy smile that Jon is so quickly starting to hate. He nods appreciatively as the tape recorder clicks off. “Excellent work, Jonathan. That went even better than I expected.”

“I--right--” Jon set the paper down gingerly. He feels… dizzy, he thinks, too light and untethered, like he might float away. He feels tired. He feels like he’s going to throw up. “Did… was there something in that water?”

A wrinkled hand settles against his forehead lightly before it migrates down, cupping his cheek. Mr. Wright peers carefully into his face. “Hmm. Took more than a little out of you, it seems.”

“I feel--” Jon tries to speak, but the words just roll around in his mouth like marbles, too heavy and clumsy for his tongue to ever lift. The light hurts his eyes, suddenly. “Did you give me something?”

“Easy, Jonathan,” murmurs Mr. Wright, moving to his side. “Don’t go upsetting yourself now.” 

Distantly, Jon’s aware of Mr. Wright’s arms hooking under his, of him guiding him up and out of the chair and supporting his fawn-clumsy steps. He leads him to the cot in the corner and helps him lie down. 

“Rest now,” Mr. Wright tells him, and Jon feels his papery-white fingers twist their way through his dark, tangled hair. “Can’t have you making yourself ill, can we?”

Jon feels like he should say something clever then, but he also feels like if he ever opens his mouth again, he’ll vomit, so he elects to keep it shut. He tries to keep his eyes open but the room swims horribly the more he looks, so he squeezes them closed and prays for the room to still beneath him. There’s a chill at his back cutting through the thin fabric of his shirt, and Jon thinks there might be a vent there, something to let the air in. He wonders if he can shout through it for help, and then wonders if he’ll ever be able to shout again. He can’t open his mouth. 

Jon falls asleep as Mr. Wright begins a hum, and his last thoughts are of the chill of the air and the spin of the room, and of the thin, pale fingers crawling their way through his hair. 

**~*~**

When Jon wakes, Mr. Wright is gone, and he’s alone.

He blinks hazily, his eyelids coming apart reluctantly against the grit. The dim lights overhead burn when he peels them open, like knives in his brain, and Jon quickly shuts them again. 

His head pounds. 

It takes him a good twenty minutes to feel human enough to try to open them again, and a good ten minutes after that to be able to sit up. His mouth is dry and rancid, his tongue too thick in his mouth to have any hope for speech, and his throat isn’t much better. 

There’s a needle in his arm, feeding into an IV line that hangs from a coat hanger attached to a shelf. Jon blinks at it, confused, before he moves to fumble with the tape pinning it down.

“Don’t touch that, Jonathan.”

Jon flinches. 

He hadn’t noticed the door opening, hadn’t heard the heavy, lead-soled footsteps that always heralded the arrival of Mr. Wright. 

Mr. Wright frowns at him. In long, quick strides, he crosses the room, pressing his leathered palm to Jon’s forehead and forcing his head upwards. He forces their eyes to meet. “Still feverish I see.”

Jon swallows. 

Mr. Wright releases him a moment later. “Drink this,” he commands, shoving a lukewarm water bottle in his hands. Then, a moment later, he snaps,  _ “All  _ of it.”

Jon’s stomach aches by the time he’s allowed to lower the bottle again, and his tongue feels odd and swollen. “How long was I asleep for?”

Mr. Wright looks at him sharply, and Jon flinches. After a moment of watching, he says, “A few days.”

Jon startles. 

“You’ll be glad to hear that you won’t have to be here for much longer,” continues Mr. Wright, headless of Jon’s distress. “My arrangements for you are almost complete. We’ll be moving to a more permanent location tonight.”

Tears well up in the corner of Jon’s eyes once more. He tries to push them back, but they press harder, stronger, and Jon soon finds them spilling over the corners of his lids and down his cheeks. Mr. Wright sighs, looking over at him with thin, pressed lips, but that just makes Jon cry harder. Soon, he’s a mess of hiccups and sobs and wet, sticky snot, and he presses his forehead to his bunched knees in an attempt to hide from those awful eyes. 

Mr. Wright says nothing as Jon wracks with shuddering sobs. He just watches. 

“All done?” he asks, lightly, when his tears finally slow, but that just sends him into another spiral. Mr. Wright sighs. 

When Jon is close to calm, Mr. Wright jabs a handkerchief in his direction. “Clean yourself,” he orders, and Jon obeys, face red and tight. 

Mr. Wright regards him with cold, clear eyes. “Do try to avoid similar demonstrations in the future,” he says, his voice light with danger. “I hardly have the patience for them.”

Jon squeezes his eyes shut. In a small, thin voice, he says, “I want to go home.”

“You’ve established that.” Mr. Wright steps towards him, and Jon flinches backwards, crowding against the wall. Rather than striking him again, however, Mr. Wright merely takes his wrist in his hand and places the tips of his fingers against the pulse point. He frowns. “And I believe I have established that that won’t be happening.”

Jon sucks in a horrible, shuddering breath, and the fingers against his wrist tighten, nails digging into skin. “I want my mum.”

Mr. Wright scoffs. “You’re not even going to ask for something possible?”

Jon flinches.

His list of wants are impossible at the moment, he knows, bound away by the breach of time and distance. He still wants them.

He wants his mum. (His mum is dead.)

He wants his dad. (His dad is dead.)

He wants Nan. (Nan doesn’t want him.)

He wants to go home. (Mr. Wright won’t let him.)

He wants to go  _ home _ . (Tommy Bradstaff is home, waiting.)

He wants to  _ go home.  _ (He can’t.)

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’ll display a modicum of decorum when I bring you out from this room?” says Mr. Wright, a sour look on his face. “Allow me to take this moment to make myself clear: There will be no one else in the building when we leave. There will be no one around the building. There will be no one to hear you. If you try to run, I will find you, and the consequences will be…  _ considerable _ . Am I understood?”

Jon presses his face back into his knees. He jerks a nod. 

_ “In words,  _ Jonathan.”

“Yes,” whispers Jon. 

“In the meantime, I want you to rest in here.” Mr. Wright’s eyes rove over him in another awful, searing glance. “Do not excite yourself. I will be leaving you additional bottles of water, and I expect them all to be consumed by the time I return. You will remain in bed and out of trouble.” 

There’s a rustle of fabric, the creak of a chair, and then Mr. Wright’s footsteps are moving closer, until Jon can feel him hovering inches away. “Lie down, Jonathan.”

For a moment, Jonathan scrunches closer, presses his forehead harder against his knees as if it could possibly protect him. Then, trembling, he unwinds himself, and settles against the cot as if it were made of ironcast nails. 

Huffing a breath, Mr. Wright takes his arm in his hand once more. His fingers are cold when he presses them to his wrist, hard as a bone, and Jon buries his face into the pillow and squeezes his eyes shut. 

“You’ve worked yourself into a state,” mutters Mr. Wright, accusingly. “If you continue like this, you’ll make yourself sick.”

At this, his grip on Jon’s wrist slacks, and Jon hurriedly slips it free and tucks it to his chest. He presses his face harder into the pillow. 

For a moment, Jon thinks it might be over, and that Mr. Wright might leave him alone once more. But Mr. Wright does not leave. Rather, he settles into the desk chair and waits, watching him. 

And his eyes never leave him. Jon feels his gaze until the moment he falls asleep. 

**~*~**

There is a draft at Jon’s back. He feels it when he lies in the cot, which is always, as Mr. Wright never gives him leave to get out. He tries, a few times, but Mr. Wright unfailingly knows, and when he tells Jon that he disobeyed again, it… isn’t pleasant. 

So Jon spends a lot of time in the bed. He spends a lot of time feeling the draft. 

Because this is a soundproof room. This is a  _ sealed _ room. There shouldn’t be a draft. And even if there were a draft, it shouldn’t be coming from beneath him. 

Which means there must be an opening somewhere. One Jon could find. One Jon could  _ use.  _

An air vent, at least. Something he could scream into. Ideally, a way out, but Jon’s not holding out too much hope. 

Slowly, Jon sits up. He gets out of bed, and he pulls the cot from the wall. 

Frowning, he inspects the floor, looking for any sign of  _ anything.  _ The carpet beneath is dull and grey and faintly stained, speckled with rusty brown splotches that Jon tells himself is coffee. But there’s no… secret trapdoor that’s going to save him. No way out. 

Jon huffs a breath, frustrated. Holding both palms out, he runs it along the edges of the carpet, feeling carefully along. His fingers graze upon a bump, and when he pushes, it slips beneath. 

Jon blinks. Excited now, he digs his fingers deeper, and the carpet gives way beneath them, coming up to reveal a dull brown door. 

It’s… a secret trapdoor that’s going to save him. Jon laughs, giddy, high-pitched, and he tugs it open. 

The cold air hits him first. It’s musty and wet, and it smells of moss and stale, aged water. As Jon peers down, all he sees is darkness, endless and deep. He can’t see more than a few inches past the doorway. 

It’s Mr. Wright that makes the decision for him. 

He hears the footsteps hammer overhead, for the first time panicked. Every other time he descended the stairwell, it had been a calm, leisurely thudding, giving Jon plenty of time to be afraid as he approached. This time, however, Mr. Wright is sprinting. 

There’s a flashlight in the corner. Jon lunges for it. As he catches sight of the window, he sees the door to the Archives open, and Mr. Wright sprints through. 

He has another locked door to get through before he can get to Jon. Jon, however, does not. 

He lets his legs hang over the edge, into the darkness below, and he hopes that the drop is not too far. He pushes off right as he hears the key slip into the lock. 

And he falls. 

  
  



	2. the many labors of mr. wright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1995.
> 
> Deep down, Jon still thinks there's such a thing as saving people. This is not without consequences.

The stone is wet when he lands. 

The fall is short but Jon slips when his feet hit the surface below, his hands coming up before him to shield his fall. Beneath his hands there is a mossy, clinging wetness, and a cold which cuts through his palms and into his bones. 

Above him, Jon hears footsteps. Running steps. 

He shoves himself to his feet, fleeing the small square of light from the trap door above and rushing blindly into the dark beyond. He holds his hands out before him, searching for a door, a wall, anything but the dark. 

He’s barely ten steps past where he landed before he can no longer see his hands. 

His palm strikes against a wall. Another burst of muggy, clinging cold against his skin. 

Behind him, something lands heavy on the tile, and a grunt follows not a moment later. Jon darts further into the darkness, a hand braced against the wall. 

In the dark, Jon hears footsteps. Mr. Wright’s voice follows him, low and calm and entreating. 

“The tunnels are dangerous, Jonathan.” 

Jon hits another wall. He clamps a hand over his mouth to stop his gasp. 

“They go on for miles, you know,” continues Mr. Wright, and the _click click click_ of his heels on stone follows his words with hardly a beat between them. “You’ll be lost, and I won’t be able to find you down here, and neither will anyone else. If you wander too deep, you won’t be able to find your way back.” There’s a beat. Mr. Wright’s voice grows louder. “If you come back now, I won’t punish you. We’ll pretend it never happened.” 

Jon’s eyes burn. His heart beats so loudly that even Mr. Wright must hear it. 

For a few minutes, Mr. Wright continues to call him, though he never seems to drift far from the entrance. A few minutes pass. The footsteps retreat across the tile, and there’s a scuffle, and the slam of the trap door. 

Jon’s relaxes. He lets out a ragged, gulping breath. 

There’s a scuttle of footsteps in his direction. 

Jon jerks himself backwards. He flees into the dark, feet banging on the cobblestones, footsteps trailing behind. He runs until he can’t hear them anymore, the footsteps or Mr. Wright or the sound of his own name. The only sound is the _drip drip drip_ of ancient water he could never hope to see and his own heaving, sobbing gasps. 

It is dark. And Jon is afraid. 

He doesn’t dare turn on the flashlight, though. It stays clutched to his chest, a token of the office more than any actual help. Not until he’s carefully listened for Mr. Wright for minutes and minutes and minutes more. 

The beam is yellow and dusty, offering nothing more than a puddle of amber-colored light against the ancient stonework. Jon sobs when he sees it. 

The twisting of the halls echo his sob back to him, and with each new iteration, it sounds slightly more distorted, and in slightly more pain. 

With a trembling hand, Jon casts the light about him. The halls are hewn of the same musty, damp stone as the floor beneath, and they are lined with doors every few feet, each of a different shape and height. 

Jon creeps forward to the nearest door, a short, circular door made of fossilized wood and a rusted brass doorknob. It creaks loudly when he opens it, and the sound spirals out and comes back, redoubled, different. Inside, there is a single chair turned on its side set before a dusty, lonely dining room table. There is no other exit. 

Jon pulls back. He drags the beam of the light past the hall with its many lurking doors. 

He begins to walk. His footsteps ring loudly about him, and when they return, they do not sound like his own. 

**~*~**

Jon’s shoulders slump forwards when the door opens. He hears footsteps approach, and sees a pair of shiny black shoes come closer to where he sits, ensconced on the break room couch. There is a blanket around his shoulders and a cup of something warm in his hands--the woman had told him what as she handed it to him, blonde and brown eyed with lipstick smudged over her front tooth, and Jon can’t remember her name or the name of the drink or anything she said. The fluorescents overhead had been buzzing so loudly, and they had been so very bright, and he had winced and flinched at anyone who came near. 

He hadn’t let them take him to the hospital. He screamed when they tried. 

There is a monster outside of these walls, peering in. He can feel it glaring at him. It is going to eat Jon as soon as he peeks out after it.

The monster had followed him from the tunnels, he’s certain on it. He had felt it watching him the moment he stumbled out of that rusted alleyway door, isolated, hidden from the glare of city lights. Jon had sobbed when he felt the cool, crisp night air hit his face, clean and sharp the way that follows rain. There were no cars passing in the nearby street, and no people anywhere near the secluded little alcove that housed the tunnel’s exit.

He doesn’t know how he made it out of there alive. 

It felt like he had been wandering for days before he found the door out. The tunnels were labyrinthine and endless, and at times, Jon could swear the walls moved. By the time he finally found the staircase leading up, his throat was painfully dry and his stomach had long since moved past mere hunger pangs. 

And he almost didn’t find it, Jon remembers, painfully. He wouldn’t have even noticed that passageway--it had been so small, barely there, really, and the dim light of the flashlight had only grown weaker, and Jon wouldn’t have dared another small passageway after the last one even if he had noticed it. Except. He walked down the other passageway first. 

The spiders. There had been _so many of them._

When he fled down the opposite passageway, he found a spiral staircase waiting at its end, rusted and ancient. At the top had been a door. An exit. 

He had staggered through the streets until he found a building labeled Police Station. He went inside, walked to the front counter, and told the person manning it that he wanted to go home. 

They had put him in the break room, and Jon had heard whispers of calling a social worker and an ambulance. Then, the mob had retreated, though he could still hear them behind the door, whispering. 

The woman who enters is short and thin, with a neatly tucked white shirt beneath her black police vest. She smiles at Jon when she sees him look. She tells him to call her Olivia. 

Jon looks back down. 

Olivia settles across from Jon, perched at the edge of an identical couch. “Can I ask your name?”

There’s a beat. 

“Jon,” says Jon, eventually. “Jon Sims.”

She smiles at him wider, a mix of encouragement and pity. “It’s nice to meet you, Jon Sims. I have to ask you a few questions now, if you don’t mind, and then we’ll talk about what comes next. Alright?”

After a moment, Jon nods, just once. 

“Do you mind if I record?”

“I… suppose it’s alright.”

Olivia smiles at him again, as if he said the right thing. Out of her pocket, she pulls a tape recorder, and she clicks it on, settling it on the coffee table between them. 

“Could you repeat your name, just once more, for the record?”

Jon’s lips pinch sharply downward at the sight of the recorder, but he does it regardless of that fact. 

“Now, Jon, can you tell me what happened to you?”

Jon had been dreading this part. He flinches. “You’ll think me mad.”

“I promise I won’t.”

Jon really, really doubts that. 

He’s not stupid. He sounds crazy. A book tried to eat him so he went to the Magnus Institute for help, and they locked him in a little room and made him record a weird story that made him feel sick. Then, he wandered for _forever_ in the secret network of underground tunnels beneath the Magnus Institute before he finally came here. 

They’re going to say he’s making things up again. Adults always say that. 

“Adults don’t like me,” Jon admits, shamefully. “I wander too much.”

“Is that what happened to you? You wandered somewhere?” asks Olivia. 

_“No,”_ snaps Jon, and then he sucks in a breath. “I mean, sort of. I went somewhere, but I knew where I was going and I was supposed to be back that same day. I don’t even know what day it is anymore and… I couldn’t go back.”

Olivia leans forward. “What happened, Jon?”

“He locked me in a room,” says Jon, after a moment, and his voice is soft. “And he wouldn’t let me leave.”

“Who is he, Jon?” presses Olivia. “Do you know his name? Do you know where the room was?”

Jon nods, eventually. “His name was Mr. Wright. He works at the Magnus Institute.” 

Olivia’s brow furrows. 

Jon flinches backwards. “You don’t believe me,” he says, accusatorial, and he pulls his legs to his chest. “Adults _never do,_ and they never help, and you won’t help and Mr. Wright will lock me up again--”

His voice breaks off into a sob.

“Jon, Jon, no--” A weight settles at his side. “Jon, can I touch you?”

Jon sobs harder. He gives a slight inclination of his head. 

Olivia’s arms wrap around him, wiry and steady. She tucks Jon to her chest. 

“I believe you, Jon,” she says. “We’re going to help you, I promise. Now, this is important, I need you to tell me where he locked you up. Did he take you to another building? His house, maybe?”

Jon swipes at his cheeks, the heel of his hand dragging painfully against his skin. Shaking his head, he says, “We never left the Institute. There was an office in the basement. It belonged to a woman named Gertrude. She wasn’t in, for whatever reason, and the basement was soundproofed, so no one could hear me shouting. No one ever came inside other than Mr. Wright.” 

Olivia nods, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head slightly. “Alright, Jon. Now, what we’re going to do is, I’m going to pop out for a moment, and I’m going to have some of my friends out there find Mr. Wright. In the meantime, we’ll be taking you to the hospital--don’t worry, I’ll be going with you--and we’re going to fix you up and call your parents, and there will be a bit more questions after that, okay? How does that sou--”

Olivia does not finish her question. Instead, an odd, wet gurgling noise comes out of her mouth, and a red line paints itself across her neck, from beneath one ear to all the way to the other, and something hot and wet and red splatters across Jon’s face. When Jon blinks, the scene before him blurs, twists, takes a new shape, and he can finally see the old, weathered hand through the plastic of the glove, and it covers Olivia’s mouth. 

Another hand clamps over Jon’s mouth before he can so much as scream, and it wrenches him from his chair and against someone’s side. 

It doesn’t take long for her to stop moving. Jon watches as it happens. 

“You are a very, very stupid boy,” hisses Mr. Wright, low and furious in Jon’s ear. “I would have let her live if you had just kept your stupid mouth shut. I would have even let you go.” 

Jon tries to scream. Mr. Wright’s hand clamps down harder, forcing his jaw shut with a bone-cracking snap. 

“We are going to walk out there together,” he hisses. “And you are not to make a single sound. You are to walk quietly outside. If you so much as whimper, you will die, and so will the other people in the room. You are not going to run. You are going to do _exactly_ as I say. Nod if you understand.” 

Jon nods frantically. 

Mr. Wright releases him. 

Jon falls to the ground, his jaw clamped tightly shut and his hands coming up over his head. Mr. Wright pays him little heed, instead scooping up the tape recorder from the table, not even clicking it off before setting it in his pocket. He begins to look over the scene around them with a careful eye, and it is in that moment that Jon realizes his clothes are covered in plastic and his shoes have slips over them, that there are gloves covering his bloody red hands and a net covering his hair and a mask covering his face. 

Jon’s read more than a few grisly detective novels in his day. There won’t be any evidence to be found. 

Olivia sits on the couch, eyes still open, staring at nothing. Blood leaks from the slit in her neck, turning her shirt from white to a sticky, leaking red. It trails down the length of her arm, down the line of her fingers, dripping a small puddle on the floor. 

Jon picks up her wrist in his hand. He gives it a small shake. “Olivia.”

It’s more of a breath than a word, soft, barely there. Mr. Wright doesn’t so much as glance at him. 

Olivia does not move, because dead people never do. Jon thinks she’s dead. He thinks it’s his fault.

Jon gives it another slight shake. “Olivia, Olivia, please. You promised.” 

Mr. Wright glares at him that time. He takes a step towards Jon. 

Jon’s whispers become more urgent, more afraid. There is a scream in his throat but he doesn’t let it out, not with Mr. Wright so close. He’s a coward. There’s a police station full of cops past that door and Jonathan Sims is a _coward,_ because he won’t dare signal a one of them. Not with Mr. Wright right there, with his knife and his anger and the way he impossibly twists Jon’s sight. Jon swipes at his eyes, and he smears blood across his face, and his tears mix with it as they stream. 

He’s a monster.

He’s going to take Jon back. 

“Please,” whispers Jon. “Please, I’m afraid.”

Mr. Wright’s hand clamps over Jon’s mouth once more. He jerks Jon back by the throat and makes him stand. 

“Not a sound,” he hisses, and then he moves him towards the door. 

No one looks towards the door as it opens, and no one looks towards Jon and Mr. Wright as they step out, Jon led by the arm and both covered in blood. 

It’s like they can’t see them. It’s like they’re not even there. 

Mr. Wright squeezes Jon’s arm painfully. Jon walks. 

He hears them, as he passes, and they’re talking about Oliva, and they’re talking about Jon, as if one were still alive and the other wasn’t doomed. 

“Do you think she’s doing alright in there?” asks one, sipping at a mug, and he’s talking about poor, dead Olivia, with her shirt soaked in blood. “I mean, she must be, she hasn’t come out yet.”

His desk mate shakes her head. “Poor kid seemed scared to death,” she says, and she’s talking about Jon, who is inches from her, and he is so, so afraid. “She’ll get through to him, though. She’s good with kids.”

They don’t turn to look, no one does, and Mr. Wright leads Jon out of the building and into the street. He keeps dragging Jon down the road, turning around one corner and then another. They pass a man sitting on a street corner, awake and staring ahead, scuffing his shoe against the sidewalk and flipping a coin in one hand. He whistles an unfamiliar tune. 

His tune does not falter as they pass, and he continues to flip his coin. He does not blink as Jon’s feet drag straight past his spot, leaving the imprint of his sneaker tread in a sharp red outline, and his eyes maintain their distant, unfocused look. 

It’s like Jon’s a ghost. It’s like he’s already dead. 

Mr. Wright drags him for another few blocks before tossing Jon into the passenger seat of a van. As the door slams behind him, he hears the wail of sirens start up in the distance. 

Mr. Wright climbs into the driver’s seat a moment later. He inserts the keys into the ignition, but he does not turn them. 

“There are going to be consequences for that,” he spits. He does not so much as look at Jon. “Considerable consequences.”

“You killed her,” says Jon, panic climbing in his chest, and he wishes he had screamed while they were still in the station. He thinks it might have been better to die there than die wherever Mr. Wright is taking him. His vision blurs, though he doesn’t think it’s Mr. Wright’s doing this time. He can’t stop the tears as they flood his cheeks. “You--you’re _crazy.”_

Mr. Wright gives him a nasty look. “Now you’re getting it.”

Jon flinches. “There will be cameras in the station,” he babbles. He's crying. He can’t seem to stop. “They’ll catch you.”

“The police are going to discover that all of their cameras stopped working all at once,” says Mr. Wright, his voice like ice. “Temperamental things. They short circuited before you even walked in the doors. You were too petrified to tell them much of anything when you first came in, so they don’t even have your name, let alone mine, and I have the only recording telling of either. The only physical evidence they might find will be of you, fingerprints or otherwise, and I very much doubt you already have a record in the system. All they have is your face, and you were covered in detritus and your own snot when you came in. They won’t have an accurate description. They are unlikely to trace your presence there, and they certainly won’t be able to trace my presence there. Now, I suggest you start thinking very hard of ways you might survive this night, because your actions so far haven’t exactly endeared yourself to me.”

Mr. Wright keeps the car engine off for another few minutes, until the sirens have long since roared past. Then, he starts the car, and he pulls them down one side road, then another, then another, until Jon can barely tell where they are. 

Mr. Wright doesn’t look at Jon. He keeps his eyes on the road. 

Jon’s eyes dart to the door. It’s locked. He isn’t wearing a seatbelt. 

Child locks typically are only functional on back doors. The front doors usually just pop open when you try the handle. You can usually open the locks manually, even when they don’t. 

Mr. Wright isn’t looking at Jon. Jon isn’t wearing a seatbelt. 

The car slows to a stop. When Jon looks up, he sees the red glow of the stoplight. 

He waits until it changes to green. He waits for Mr. Wright to begin to move once more. And then, he dives for the door. 

It opens. Jon tumbles to the pavement. 

The wind is knocked out of him with the fall, and he rocks backwards, his arm pinned beneath his body and his legs splaying every which way. His wrist hurts something terrible, though it’s not broken. Jon broke his ankle, once, and this is not nearly the same feel.

The car moves a few precious extra meters before Mr. Wright thinks to engage the brakes. 

_“Jonathan!”_

But Jon is already darting down a side road, and he won’t make the mistake of stopping again. 

**~*~**

Mr. Wright hadn’t taken the money from his pockets when he locked Jon up. There’s enough left for a one way ticket to Bournemouth. 

Jon scrubs the blood from his face in the train station bathroom, and it’s early enough in the day that there’s no one there to see it. From there, he barely makes it onto the early train, though no one pays him much mind as he sprints through the station. He wonders if it’s for the same reason that no one paid him much mind on his trip from Bournemouth, blood on his fingers and terror on his face and a book that kills on his back. 

Jon wonders which is the part of him which makes people not want to help. 

Tucking himself into the corner of his seat, he begins to consider his plan, and the fact that he very much doesn’t have one. His eyes begin to burn again. 

He wants his mum. 

Jon swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. He can’t afford to lose his nerve now--or, well, lose it any more, considering he’s well and truly lost it no small number of times already. 

Mr. Wright is going to come after him again. And he’s got some kind of… magic… sight… thing. He’s going to kill Jon, more likely than not, if he catches him again. 

(Tommy Bradstaff is at home, waiting for him.)

Jon can’t leave Nan to him. He can’t leave her to Mr. Wright, should Mr. Wright decide to come after her as well. He’s going to go to her, and he’s going to tell her what happened, and she’s going to believe him, and they’re going to drive very far away together. And they won’t stop driving until it’s safe. And… then they’ll be safe, and it will be over. It’s… going to be okay. Jon’s going to be safe. 

He really wishes he had his mum. 

**~*~**

Jon’s always been a terrible runner. He’s never cared to listen when the gym teachers tell them to do laps, preferring to find a nice tree out of sight to sit under and suffer a trip to the principal’s office when he inevitably gets caught. He had always been more of the bookish sort. That is not to say, however, that being the bookish sort kept him out of trouble. He got into plenty of it; he just preferred to walk his way out of it than run.

He got caught a lot, come to think of it. 

As he sprints from the train station, he wishes that he had gotten better at it, the running thing. He’s had to do quite a bit in the past few days. He has to do more of it now, if he’s to outrun the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff.

The train station isn’t nearly as big as the one in London, and Jon clears its doors easily. Nan’s house is too far to make on foot, but his bus pass is still in his pocket as well, and the nearest stop is not far outside of the station. Jon collapses on the bench and waits. 

All at once, the absurdity of his situation strikes him. He’s on the run for his life, twice over, from an office worker and a bully full of webs. A book tried to eat him. He got _kidnapped._ And he’s sitting on a bench. Waiting for a bus. 

Jon laughs, and he pretends it’s the reason for all the trembling. He’s still shaking when the bus arrives.

The stop nearest his house is a good half hour wait. Jon spends the ride perched on the edge of the seat nearest the door, gripping the vinyl seat cover and flinching at every bump. When the doors crane themselves open, he’s off like a shot, more tripping down the stairs than descending them. 

There is a car parked outside of Nan’s house. It is not Nan’s car. 

It also isn’t Mr. Wright’s car, which gives Jon hope. The exterior is a slightly shiny grey and the car itself is obviously expensive, and not the sort of car that you always hear associated with kidnappers. It’s not a beat up van, at least. 

Jon slows to a stop. 

He could still turn around, he thinks. He could get back on the bus, and ride as far as it could go, and then get on another bus, and then another one. He could turn his life into an endless stream of buses and never ever have to deal with whatever is waiting in the house. 

His feet begin to move once more. Slowly, he crosses the driveway and the lawn, and ascends the steps leading up the door like a man mounting a gallows. 

Nan is still inside. It’s as simple as that. 

Jon places his hand on the doorknob. The metal is cold as ice and bites into his palm, stinging with the intensity of the chill. With a sharp intake of breath, Jon yanks his hand back, staring down at the door in shock. 

From the crack beneath the door, tendrils of fog leaks out, icy white and biting cold. 

Jon stumbles backwards. He can see more fog now, nipping around his ankles and dissipating against the pavement. It continues its steady creep out the door. 

Jon swallows. He looks back over the lawn, and at the freedom of the road behind. The fog has not yet reached the street. It swirls low against the grass, thin and faint, and Jon could so easily outpace it. 

He could get back on the bus. He could run. He didn’t have to open the door. 

But Nan is still inside. Jon can feel it. 

In the back of his mind, Jon can still see poor, dead Tommy Bradstaff, as he was before the spiders, as he was when he knocked on the door. There had been that moment, the second where the door creaked open, the legs, the gasp-before-a-scream. Jon can see it when he closes his eyes. 

There had been that moment after, too, that strange conviction that dawned on him as the door closed once more. Jon had known, in that moment, that moment after, that Tommy Bradstaff would still be alive if he had not had not met the misfortune that was Jonathan Sims.

There had been another conviction that followed not so much a second later. It had been the foolish, bullheaded certainty that Jon could have done something to save him, had he done anything at all. 

Maybe that’s why Jon turns that bitterly cold knob. Maybe he had been so stupidly operating on the belief that there was such a thing as saving people. 

Or maybe he had simply not wanted another person to die in his place. Jon never could quite figure out which it had been, after. 

There is more fog in the Sims house. 

It licks up the walls, frothing around the photographs, misting about the dim light slowly swinging above. The chill intensifies the moment he crosses the threshold, and Jon gasps against the painful pinch of the cold in his lungs. 

The hallway is dark, and the shadows seem to writhe in the corner of his eye, stretching long and menacing against the single mounted lamp. It makes a small, tinny squeak as it rocks methodically above Jon’s head, caught in a wind he cannot feel. 

Jon takes another step. The hall seems to lengthen before him. 

He takes another step. He thinks he can hear voices. 

He takes another step. The voices grow stronger. The chill follows suit. 

The path to the kitchen is far longer than it should be, and Jon can barely see through the fog and the dim by the time he finally trades the carpet of the hall for the kitchen’s tile. The cold is almost malicious now, clawing at Jon’s arms and at the insides of his lungs, and his breath comes in ragged, terrified gulps. 

Nan sits at the kitchen table, seemingly unconcerned with the fog and the chill. With her sits a man, young, clad in a dark blue jacket with brilliant gold buttons. His hair is a stark white despite his age, and his thick beard does nothing further to provide color. His entire body appears to be leached of it, drained, empty, like the photo negative of a man rather than a man itself. He’s paler than any man Jon has ever seen. His eyes, too, are such an odd, faint grey that they almost fade into the white of his sclera.

There are tea cups between them, full and unsteaming. It doesn’t look like either of them have had so much as a sip. There is also a book, something thick and old and bound in leather, though Jon can’t quite make out the title from where he stands. There is a strange design on its cover, a maze of embossed gold, one that almost seems to writhe against the dark brown of the leather. 

Nan does not look at Jon, and neither does the man. 

“Do you have any family?” asks the man, and he turns, and he winks at Jon as he says it. “Other than the little one, that is.”

Jon flinches backwards. 

“No, just Jonathan,” says Nan. Her voice is so far away as she says it. It isn’t like her. Nan is firm, and Nan is present, and Nan is sharper than any knife could ever be. Nan had been a mountain in his mind for as long as Jon had memory, and she had all of its unshakeable nature. She shouldn’t be this. “His father was my only child, and my husband passed on years ago. It’s just us.”

“Must be a comfort,” says the man, though the man says it like he doesn’t believe it himself. “Like a little piece of his father, he must be.”

“He’s nothing like his father,” says Nan, immediately. “All his mother, every last bit of him. A carbon copy of her, really.”

“Oh?” The man sounds interested, now. “And did you like her? His mother, that is.”

“No.”

Jon makes a choked, keening noise, something almost animal in the way that it hurts. He takes a stumbling step forward. 

“She was an inconsiderate girl.” (Jon was inconsiderate.) “Far too flighty.” (Jon was flighty.) “She hadn’t an ounce of sense to her. She would run off without thinking and everyone else would be left to deal with the fallout.” (This was Jon, Jon, and people hated him for it.)

“Really?” says the man. “Must be a bit of a relief for you, then, that the little one ran off. Sounds like he was causing problems.”

“No.” Nan frowns. She shifts in her seat, blinking, and confusion and concern crinkles at the corners of her eyes. “He’s my grandson. I have a responsibility to him. I want him safe.” 

Jon says, “Nan,” and his voice is watery and weak. “Nan, I’m here.” 

He reaches out, grabs her by the sleeve, but she doesn’t even glance down at the hand around her wrist. Jon gives it a small shake. He’s crying again. He hadn’t noticed starting.

The man grins at him, and offers him another wink.

“Nan, _please,”_ says Jon, and he edges closer to her side, turning a shoulder to the man and his awful, awful grin. He doesn’t know if he’s trying to shield Nan from him or to shield himself. “Let’s leave.” He gives her wrist another shake, crying harder. _“Why won’t you look at me?”_

Nan’s frown deepens. Her face adopts a hard look, one Jon is more than a little familiar with. For a moment, he thinks it’s directed at him. 

“Who did you say you were with again?” Nan asks the man. “Was it the police?”

“Oh, goodness no. I’m just helping out a… mutual friend, let’s call him. He has a vested interest in Jonny’s safe retrieval.” 

Jon swipes at his cheeks with the heel of his hand in a futile attempt to clear away the tears and the mess. The man is watching him still, and this close, his pale eyes look like they’re made of glass. Jon shrinks closer against Nan’s shoulder, trying to hide himself in the fabric of her shirt. 

“Nan, _please,”_ he babbles, pulling at her wrist more urgently now. “Please just... wake up and--we can get in the car and we can go away and I want to go away now. I don’t want to do this anymore please please _please--”_

“Oh Jonny,” says the man, and he sounds genuinely sympathetic as he says it. “It’s far too late for that.”

And the fog eats Nan. 

It bites up her ankles, climbing the length of her legs and wrapping around her torso like snakes, then cycling higher, up, until it covers her head entirely. And then she’s just-- _gone._ Swallowed. 

She hadn’t even the time to scream.

Jon falls through the space where she sat, slamming her chair with his elbow and sending it crashing sideways against the tile. Jon’s knees hit the floor and Nan isn’t there, she’s _gone_ like poor, dead Tommy Bradstaff, and perhaps she’ll come back too, fog clambering from her mouth and eyes made of glass. Perhaps she’ll want to eat Jon too and Jon will let her, because his biggest mistake was not just getting eaten in the first place and saving everyone else the trouble. 

Or maybe she won’t come back. Maybe she’s dead. Maybe it’s Jon’s fault. 

The man stands from his seat. He rounds the table, fog swirling thickly around him, and the clack of his heels on the tile echo loudly through the house. He stops at Jon’s side. 

“There there now, don’t cry,” he says. “She’ll be back. Or, well, maybe not. Still not a reason to cry.” He eyes Jon with unconcealed interest, like the older boys on the playground do before they drop a lit firecracker in an anthill. “She didn’t even like you, you know.”

“She was my Nan,” says Jon, and he wonders when that stopped being enough to prove love. Perhaps he’s never been the sort where simply being family meant that they would love you. “She was all I had. _What did you do?”_

“Oh, just… sent her somewhere else, for a bit. Bit of a lonely woman, your Nan. Not much friends, didn’t like her family. Held up well against it, but everyone has their breaking points.”

_“Bring her back here!”_

“You know, I would, but…” The man feigns thoughtfulness for a moment before shaking his head. “Well, honestly, I just don’t want to.”

Jon lunges for him. 

With a delighted laugh, the man catches him, easily holding him at a distance. Jon squirms, trying to wrench himself free, but the man’s hand on his shoulder is strong and the pressure clamps hard on his collarbone, enough to bruise. 

“Easy now,” says the man, still chuckling. “I’m not the one you have to convince to bring your Nan back.”

 _“Who then?”_

“Aren’t you supposed to be clever? I hope this wasn’t a wasted trip.”

Jon goes slack in his grip. The fear begins in his gut, percolates, drips outwards. He feels cold. He doesn’t know if it’s the fear or the fog.

“Mr. Wright.”

“There you are, Jonny,” says the man, encouraging. “You might survive yet. He’s in the next room over, and I suggest you don’t keep him waiting anymore than you already have.” He releases his arm. “Off you pop.”

The man has Nan. Mr. Wright could get her back. 

Jon swallows. He goes to the next room. 

When he enters, the fog does not enter with him. 

Mr. Wright is in the side room, which Nan calls her drawing room and Jon calls the boring room he isn’t allowed inside. Nan keeps her most uncomfortable furniture in this room, the sort that is polished and stiff and only gets sat in if Nan has the ladies from The Book Club over, which is what she calls it when she invites her old friends over, ostensibly to read the Bible, but Jon knows that’s a lie because Nan isn’t even religious, and also he eavesdropped once. 

Mrs. Penstemons is married to some rich old businessman, is all, and so are Mrs. Reaves and Mrs. Blake, and Nan has a good head for numbers and worked in stocks before she retired. They get together once every few weeks and make boring conversation about their husbands’ works and then there’s a lot of boring numbers and trading talk and they move money into accounts that their husbands don’t know about. They’ve never even cracked a Bible. Nan lets Jon select any book he’d like from a bookstore once a month as long as he keeps quiet on that fact, and Jon doesn’t see why anyone would be interested in it anyway. 

Mr. Wright is seated in the chair to the right, where Mrs. Penstemons usually sits when she visits. He smiles icily at Jon when he steps in the room. 

Jon blinks. He glances behind him, then turns fully when he sees the kitchen behind him. There isn’t any fog. 

It’s empty. Nan isn’t there, and neither is the man who took her. 

Swallowing hard, Jon turns back. 

Mr. Wright nods to the seat across from him, and he raises a brow. 

Jon nods, heart hammering in his chest. He crosses the room and sits in the seat which usually belongs to Mrs. Blake. 

Mr. Wright stares at him from across the coffee table. Something else stares at him through the windows at his back. 

Jon says, “Bring Nan back.”

Mr. Wright smiles thinly. “Do you really think you’re in the position to be making requests right now, Jonathan?”

“I--” Jon swallows. He rubs his palms against his pant legs. “I want her back.”

“I told you there would be consequences. Why shouldn’t I just let you live with them?”

_“Give her back!”_

_“Do not raise your voice to me.”_

Jon flinches, hard. Mr. Wright presses his lips together and watches him through narrowed eyes. 

“I do not want this to happen again, Jonathan,” he says. “These… dramatics. The running, the trouble with the police, this ridiculousness with coming running to a woman who doesn’t even want you. It would be best if we could proceed without them, wouldn’t you agree?”

Jon does not reply. 

“I would like to make a deal with you. If you agree, I will have Mr. Lukas return your grandmother to her standard plane of existence. Does that sound nice?”

Jon does not reply. He ducks his head.

“With your words, Jonathan.”

“Yes,” says Jon, softly. 

“Excellent.” Leaning forward, Mr. Wright claps his hands. Jon shrinks back at the noise. “I already have the papers prepared.”

Jon blinks. “Papers?”

“Our agreement,” says Mr. Wright, crisply, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a neatly folded sheet. “Mr. Lukas will return your grandmother, and I promise she will not be touched as long as you do not make any contact with her whatsoever.”

“I can’t talk to her?” asks Jon, alarmed. He jumps in his seat. “But she’s my Nan.”

Mr. Wright gives him a tired look. “I believe it has been very well established that she does not care to maintain contact with you, even if I had left the option open.”

Jon can’t exactly argue that point. He’s known it for quite some time now. 

Mr. Wright unfolds the paper, placing it on the coffee table between them. From his other pocket, he produces a pen, heavy and black with silver etchings, and he sets that beside. 

Jon does not reply. He bites down on his lip, hard.

“Upon your agreement, you will be coming with me, and there will be no more contacting the police, understand? I really would rather you not cause so many deaths, Jonathan. It is getting troublesome to clean up after you.”

Jon can feel his heartbeat hammer in his throat, his chest, his wrists. He stares at the pen, then down at his hands, curled tight against his pant legs. 

“What’s to happen to me? If I go with you.”

“You needn’t worry about that.”

Jon starts to cry, silent and frightened. 

Sighing, Mr. Wright settles back in his seat, an impatient look on his face. He raises an eyebrow and waits. 

_“Why are you doing this?”_ His shoulders shudder as he cries harder. “Why won’t you just let me go?”

Jon does not expect an answer.

It’s the sort of thing he feels he is meant to say, in this sort of scenario. It’s the sort of thing a character in one of his books would say. He says it simply to say something, because if he says something, then that is another moment in which he does not have to pick up that pen, and another moment in which he does not have to sign. He’s putting off the inevitable, but he doesn’t expect it to do much past that. 

But Mr. Wright speaks. His voice is thoughtful. 

“There’s an experiment I’ve been considering for quite some time. I think you’ll do nicely for it.” 

Jon doesn’t understand, but he supposes he was never meant to. 

He sniffles. He thinks of poor, dead Tommy Bradstaff, and of Nan in the fog. He thinks he can do a single good thing for any of them, now, and take away the thing which caused their misfortune. 

“Tommy Bradstaff too,” says Jon, glancing up. “The thing that ate him. I don’t want it to get Nan.”

Mr. Wright gives a slight incline of his head. “It will be handled.”

Jon supposes there is not much left to be done. He picks up the pen. 

His hand trembles as he takes it in his hand, far too heavy, far too cold. The curved, diamond-shaped engraving on its shaft presses against the pads of his fingers. It nearly hurts. He leans over the page, then frowns, pulling back slightly. 

“This is an employment contract,” says Jon. He looks up at Mr. Wright. “I don’t understand.”

“Your understanding is hardly necessary for your signature.”

Jon opens his mouth. The look on Mr. Wright’s face kills his voice before it leaves his throat. He closes it again. 

It’s not like signing the paper would do anything to him. People can quit jobs, and it’s not like anything signed by an eight year old kidnapping victim is going to hold up in a court of law. He lowers the pen to the paper, then pauses. 

“What is it now, Jonathan?”

“I don’t know cursive.”

Mr. Wright’s tone brokers no further delay. “Print will do nicely.”

Flinching, Jon nods once, then lowers the pen to the bold, thick line lurking at the paper’s bottom. In thin, clumsy letters, he writes his name.

Nothing happens.

Blinking, Jon leans back, still clutching the pen in one hand. A part of him had expected something… more. Worse. Something magic. Instead, he just feels tired and empty and trapped. He’s run out of places to hide and is too tired to run. He just wants it to be over. 

There’s a certain numbness to it, being caught. Hope is a vicious, fluttery thing, something that hammers at your rib cage, carves out a home for itself in your chest, pours itself into your pulse until your heart can barely take it. But when it’s gone, and its horrible knocking has ceased, everything feels emptier, and everything feels still. Jon feels like a grave already dug, waiting with all the same inevitability for the corpse to fill it. 

He wants his mum. 

Mr. Wright picks up the paper with a satisfied air. He refolds the paper and sets it in his pocket before standing. 

He holds out a hand to Jon. “Let’s have a word with Mr. Lukas, shall we?”

Jon ignores the hand. Staggering to his feet, he ducks to the side, arranging himself as far from Mr. Wright as he thinks Mr. Wright would allow. Mr. Wright rolls his eyes, but he says nothing. 

The man is sitting at the table again when Jon and Mr. Wright walk through. Nan is not. 

Mr. Lukas holds a cigar in one hand, end red and burning in sharp contrast to the odd dullness of the room. As Jon watches, he exhales, and a large plume of smoke drifts from between his lips, pale and curling. Its breadth reaches far past what a single person could hold in their lungs and goes farther, until the entire room is cast in a clouded haze. Jon thinks Mr. Lukas is empty. He thinks Mr. Lukas is nothing but smoke and echoing, hollow nothingness, and if Jon were to touch him, he’d be nothing but a cloud.

When he finishes exhaling, he puts out the cigar on Nan’s table. Jon watches as the embers burn red before burning out, leaving behind chalky grey ash and a jagged circle of black. Nan hates smoking. She thinks it’s a dirty habit, and doesn’t allow it anywhere near her house. 

“All done then?” says Mr. Lukas, and he stands, stretching his arms high over his head. He frowns down at Jon. “Bit scrawny, isn’t he? Are you sure he’s worth the trouble?”

“Worried, Peter?”

Mr. Lukas shrugs, unbothered. “Not really my concern what you do with your free time.” He looks at Jon like he’s a speck of dust. “Can always turn him over to me if he doesn’t pan out, yeah? Looks like he might stave off hunger for a bit.”

Jon takes a half-step behind Mr. Wright. Mr. Lukas laughs merrily. 

“That’s enough, Peter.” Mr. Wright settles a proprietary hand on Jon’s shoulder, and Jon _hates him,_ and he wishes he could claw his own arm from its socket and leave it dangling from his grip. He’d laugh as the blood dripped on Nan’s clean tile, and he’d run from the house and leave it all behind, the arm and the man who owns it. 

Jon doesn’t think that he could ever take something Mr. Wright owned. He’d rather be without an arm than belong to Mr. Wright. 

The hand on his shoulder squeezes lightly, as if he knew what Jon was thinking. “We’ve come to an accord. Bring her back now.”

Mr. Lukas shrugs again. Nothing much seems important to him, least of all Nan.

It’s like a curtain parting. 

The mouth of the fog-filled place opens itself in Nan’s kitchen, then, and the kitchen wraps itself around it, recoiling, wrenching and twisting itself away from the cold and the hunger. The place of fog is not real and reality can never, ever let itself touch it, and it will rip itself apart to keep the two separate. 

The mouth bites into Nan’s kitchen, and reality lets it. It leaves behind the mist and the cold and a deep, pervasive ache in Jon’s bones. 

When the mouth closes again, Nan is left behind, prone and trembling on the kitchen tile. Her hair glistens, still damp, and she smells of the sea and old, wet air. 

_“Nan!”_

Mr. Wright stops him. 

The pressure on his shoulder is light. Two fingers pushing harder, no more, just enough to be noticeable. But its meaning is clear, and it is clear that Mr. Wright has no interest in greater exertion when it comes to managing Jon. 

Jon stops, because Tommy Bradstaff is dead, and Oliva is dead, and Nan isn’t dead but could be, and Jon would much rather be gone than have to live with more people dead in his place.

Nan’s voice is a breathy, fragile thing when she speaks. She says Jon’s name. 

“That’s more than enough of that,” says Mr. Wright promptly, and those two fingers apply pressure again, and they direct Jon off towards the door. “Peter, will you tidy up loose ends here? I think it would be best to get Jon in the car. He’s had a long day.”

The two fingers press again. Jon swallows, hard, but his tongue is too thick in his mouth, and his pulse is beating too hard. He can barely breathe. 

When the fingers press again, they hurt. Jon sets off towards the door without a word. 

“That’s my grandson,” says Nan, her voice barely more than a whisper. It’s hoarse. Jon wonders if she had been screaming, wherever she was. “Stop.”

“Easy there,” says Mr. Lukas, and Jon’s head snaps around when he hears his boots cross the tile. He grips Nan by the arm, helping her to her feet and pulling her to the table. “This is going to be nothing but a bad dream soon.”

Nan tugs against his hold. “Stop it,” she says, still hoarse but adopting one of the flintier edges usually reserved for Jon’s worst days. “That’s my grandson, that’s-- _you, you let him go--”_

Mr. Wright steers Jon to the door, hand still firm on his shoulder. “Eyes forward, Jonathan.”

Jon keeps his eyes on Nan. He half-stumbles forward, Mr. Wright dragging him towards the door at a pace he can hardly match. He almost trips, but Mr. Wright keeps him standing. 

Nan spins on Mr. Lukas. She goes for his eyes.

Sighing, he catches her hand with ease, shoving her roughly into the table. Nan cries out, but Mr. Lukas simply picks the book off the table and flips to a page midway through. 

Jon stops dead. Mr. Wright drags him forward, and his feet skid against the tile. 

_“You said you wouldn’t touch her,”_ says Jon, swatting uselessly at the hand gripping his shoulder. He skids a few more inches forward, and scratches at Mr. Wright’s wrist instead. _“Stop it!”_

“Here we go, gran,” says Mr. Lukas. He shoves the book directly in her line of sight. “Time to calm down now.”

Nan wrenches her face away. _“Jon,”_ she says, and she doesn’t say anything else, because her eye catches sight of the book. 

Her voice drops away all of a sudden. As if in a trance, she takes the book from Mr. Lukas’s hands, and she sits down on the floor like a child. Her hair falls in her face as she leans over the page, her mouth silently forming words as she reads. 

Mr. Wright pulls him fully into the hall, and the walk to the door isn’t nearly so long as it had been when Jon first entered the house. Soon, the warmth of the mid-morning sun is hot against his skin, and the door is swinging shut behind them. 

Mr. Wright marches Jon to the waiting car. 

“What was that book?” demands Jon, yanking at his arm. “Is it going to hurt her?”

“It will do no lasting damage,” says Mr. Wright, shortly, and he opens the car door. “In you go, Jonathan.” 

Jon’s jaw clenches. He opens his mouth. 

“I really would not argue,” warns Mr. Wright. “We are still in your grandmother’s driveway.”

Jon snaps his mouth shut again. He climbs into the car, and the door shuts behind him. A moment later, Mr. Wright gets into the passenger seat. 

The doors lock pointedly.

The inside of the car is outfitted in rich, dark leather. It still smells new, apart from the faint, lingering scent of salt air.

Only a few minutes pass before Mr. Lukas comes out. When he climbs into the driver’s seat, the smell of salt grows stronger. 

“All taken care of,” says Mr. Lukas, jovial, and he starts the ignition. “You’ll owe me for this one, James.” 

“Your assistance is always appreciated, Peter,” says Mr. Wright, agreeably. “Seatbelt, Jonathan.”

Jon’s eyes burn. He puts his seatbelt on in a single, robotic motion. The car pulls out of the driveway. 

Mr. Wright and Mr. Lukas keep on a running dialogue, but Jon can’t make out a word past the pulse roaring in his ears. 

He’s afraid, he’s--he’s so stupid. He wishes he had turned around and run when he had the chance. He wishes he never opened the door. He wishes he never read the book. It had been easy to decide to be brave when he was in the same position he had been with Tommy Bradstaff, watching the person who was about to be killed in his place from a safe distance. He just hadn’t wanted anyone else to die because of him. But he had never been in Tommy Bradstaff’s place. Not before now. He had never been the one on the verge of dying, or something worse. 

(He doesn’t want to die.)

He begins to cry again. He doesn’t dare try the door. Mr. Wright isn’t the sort of man who makes the same mistake twice. 

**~*~**

The car stops sooner than Jon thinks it should. 

He expects London. He expects the Magnus Institute, with its awful basement and dark, twisting tunnels. But not even fifteen minutes has passed when Mr. Lukas pulls off to the side of bumpy gravel road which borders the forest. 

Jon’s heart leaps into his throat. A moment later, it calms slightly. Mr. Wright’s car is parked a few meters farther on the same road. Is that it, then? Just a change of cars? 

Jon eyes the trees. He knows how deep the forest goes, and how good it is for hiding things. 

The doors unlock. “Come along, Jonathan.”

Jon supposes that there’s not much more he can do about it. He doesn’t think running will work, and he can’t fight. He gets out of the car. 

“And where are you going?”

Jon stops, midway to Mr. Wright’s car. “I thought…”

Mr. Wright nods to the trees, just once. 

Swallowing, Jon says, “Oh.” 

And he follows. 

Mr. Lukas comes along, though he doesn’t speak. He walks with them parallel through the trees, silent and at a distance. At times, Jon can hear him whistling a slow, haunting tune. 

He starts to cry again partway through the march. They are deep in the trees by the time the first tear falls, and Jon doesn’t think he’ll ever be found. 

Mr. Wright notices and he stops, turning towards him with a sigh. “What is it now?”

“I won’t run again,” Jon mumbles, hiccuping out a sob. “I promise. Can we go back to the car now?”

Mr. Wright pinches the bridge of his nose. “We are not out here to hurt you.”

Jon sniffles. “Do you promise?”

He feels foolish the moment it leaves his lips. Mr Wright’s promise isn’t worth a thing. 

Another heavy sigh. “We are here to fulfill a part of our deal. I did not go to all of this trouble just to dispose of your corpse in the woods. No delays, now.”

Mr. Wright brings them to the tree where Jon hid the book. 

The tree waits in a gnarled patch, brittle and twisted with barely enough space for the book in its crevice. It’s bark, however, seems to roll and twitch as Jon stares, as if it was made of a buzzing, writhing static. When they round to the other side of the tree, Jon at last sees the source. 

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff sits at the tree’s base, chained and convulsing. From his every orifice crawl spiders, fleeing him as if he were a building half burnt. They scale the tree in a wave, covering almost every inch of its bark, and steadily set about encasing it in web. 

The thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff grins when it sees Jon, and more spiders crawl eagerly from the gap between its teeth. 

“Jon,” it says, and there is hardly anything left of Tommy Bradstaff’s voice. 

It tries to stand, but the shuddering grows worse as it tries to bend Tommy’s knees, and the skin of its joints splits like wet tissue. 

More spiders pour out. 

“Temporary hosts,” says Mr. Wright, distastefully. “Never keep for long.” He turns to Jon, eyebrow raised. “Satisfied?”

Jon takes a trembling, tripping step backwards. He stares at the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff, and it stares back. 

“I thought you might have had concerns over it,” continues Mr. Wright, unbothered, and he nudges away a particularly large spider with his shoe and a wrinkle of his nose. “It seems I was right. This will fulfill the last part of our bargain.” He casts an impatient glance far off, from where they came. _“Peter!”_ He turns back toward Jon. “Watch carefully now, Jonathan.”

(Fog starts to creep in. It circles around the soles of Jon’s shoes, and the cold bites through the rubber.) 

“It’s alright now, Jon,” says the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff. It smiles with Tommy Bradstaff’s perfect white teeth, and Jon can see the web and the web and the web behind. “You can still knock.” 

(The fog inches higher. It’s at their ankles now.)

“I don’t want to watch,” whispers Jon, but he doesn’t look away. 

There is a thing at his back. It watches Mr. Wright, and it watches the thing that is not Tommy Bradstaff, and it watches Jon. 

“Mr. Spider’s door is _always_ open to you. You will always be able to find it.” It tilts Tommy’s neck sharply, nearly parallel with the swirling fog beneath, twisting to look at Mr. Wright. “The Web will protect you. It will keep you bundled up so safe, and you will have a million friends to guard you.”

“Please stop,” says Jon. “Please just _stop it.”_

He doesn’t know who he’s talking to, Mr. Wright or Mr. Lukas or the thing that isn’t Tommy. He thinks it’s all of them. He just wants it to be over. 

He covers his ears, but it isn’t enough to block out Tommy’s voice. It tells him that he knows where the door is, he’ll never not know, and one day he’ll decide to knock and the Web will love him so, so much for it--

The fog rises over them like a wave. It’s brittly cold and too thick to see, and when it lowers, the chains are empty, and Tommy is gone. 

**~*~**

Jon read a story once. It had been far too old for him, and there had been too many tangled, twisty sentences and names with odd spellings. But the collection had been all Nan had gotten him at the thrift store that day, and Jon had been so terribly bored. He read the entire thing in a day, and spent the days following trying to elevate the sick, unsettled feeling which had nested beneath his skin with each story. 

In the story, there is a man who is not a very good friend, and a man who is not a friend at all. The second man tricks the first into following him down into a basement, and he locks him down there, and seals him up there forever. 

Jon always wondered if it had taken a long time for the man to die. He wondered what the man thought about while it happened. 

The story ends with the knowledge that the man was never found, and Jon always suspected that that was because no one had particularly wanted to look. 

If Jon were asked, he’d likely say that’s what he thinks is going to happen to him when he climbs into Mr. Wright’s car. He thinks of the tunnels, their awful damp, their awful dark, and he thinks that that is where Mr. Wright will make Jon’s tomb. He imagines the cold, slimy wetness of the stones and the frigid sting of the air scraping against the insides of his lungs. 

He doesn’t think he will ever be found. He doesn’t think anyone will ever care to look. 

Mr. Wright does not take him back to the Magnus Institute. 

If Jon were ever to be asked where Mr. Wright took him, he’d say that it was nowhere. It wasn’t really a place. It was an in-between, a waiting place, and it was only ever meant to be as permanent as a chrysalis. He has a lot of time to consider his answer, to set the words in line like dominos set to fall. He was nowhere. He stayed there for a long time. 

**~*~**

No one ever asks.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things start to pick up next chapter.


	3. opening night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2013.
> 
> At the second Theatre Royal, London, the curtain rises on opening night. 
> 
> It has been opening night for a long, long time.

[CLICK]

[FOOTSTEPS. THE SOUND OF TRAFFIC IN THE DISTANCE, MUFFLED, AS THOUGH THE RECORDER IS WRAPPED IN SOMETHING. FABRIC SHIFTS. THE SOUND BECOMES CLEARER]

ARCHIVIST

Oh _fuck off._

[CLICK]

**~*~**

[CLICK]

ARCHIVIST

 _(Annoyed.)_ Stop leaving tape recorders in my pocket. I refuse to do anything that would be remotely interesting to you. 

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

ARCHIVIST

I am _going_ for a _walk._

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

ARCHIVIST

Ich. _Fine._

[ FOOTSTEPS BEGIN TO MOVE BRISKLY AWAY.]

**~*~**

Jon tells himself that he is not following the Eye’s directions. 

People need balance in life. Hobbies. Breaks. It can’t all be doom-and-gloom, eldritch-gods-and-apocalyptic-rituals and all that. He read about it, once, in an article that was forwarded to him by Margaret, who headed up the Research Department when Jon had a desk there. Jon hadn’t been working in Research at the time, or ever, really. He doesn’t actually know what he had been classified as in the Institute logs then. He simply decided he needed a desk one day and sat in a free one in Research. No one told him to leave, so he stayed. 

Margaret hadn’t been his boss, strictly speaking, but she came over to his desk with a vaguely concerned air from time to time, and once offered him a pack of mints, which Jon had appreciated. Occasionally, she sent him emails, mostly to ask him not to leave cursed objects at his desk but once to forward him an article called **Is Your Work-Life Balance Healthy?** **Take this Quick and Easy Quiz to Find Out!** and another article called **Work-Life Balance: Tips to Regain Control.**

Jon had fallen into a category that read _You are in serious danger of incurring a stress-related illness or injury. You could cause irreversible damage to your health._

Which was both obvious and a bit too late, really. 

Unfortunately, it recommended either a sabbatical, a new job, setting boundaries, or more support from family and friends, all of which was rather out of the question. He did, however, send a reply to Margaret with the subject line “Re: Work-Life Balance” and a body which read “will consider a hobby when no longer metaphysically bound to a monument of terror. do u have any good book recommendations for such a time. preferable no cursed books — js.” 

She replied with a frowning emoticon, and stopped forwarding self-help articles. 

He also sent an email to HR with the subject line “setting boundaries,” CC’d Elias, and informed them that he has been ordered to set boundaries for the sake of his health, and would like to have one set directly between himself and Elias, not to be crossed under any circumstances. To be safe, there should be a hundred foot distance maintained at all times. 

Elias yelled at him. 

Jon did not get his boundary, or anything else for that matter. He did, however, start taking walks. 

The streets of London had long been dark when he pulled himself from his Archives, this time. The cobblestones shimmer in the dim light of the streetlights flanking the sidewalk’s path, and the air smells crisp and clean. Jon wonders if it rained recently. He hadn’t heard it, but it’s hard to hear much of anything in his Archives. He can’t remember how long he was down there. 

Time can be difficult for Jon. He has a nasty habit of losing it. 

Jon shakes his head. He takes a side street at random, and tells himself the decision had truly been so. 

Things can get… foggy. Loud. His head is often crowded, and lines of thought are so easily lost when there are so many to follow. It’s hard to tell which decisions are spontaneous and which are planned if you’ve already forgotten planning it.

Jon’s path pivots sharply. He takes another back alley, his heel clipping sharply against the pavement as he turns. His step quickens. 

He’s been walking for a while. He thinks. 

Gritting his teeth, he forces himself back down to a walk. He tries to think back, to remember the string, the chain of thought which led him to wander the backstreets of London at--four in the morning?

He had been in his Archives for--a while. But he had been tired. The Eye had been pressed against his shoulders, the small of his back, pressure building and building and building. He had left to--escape? Or to follow it? He can’t remember. 

He’s hungry. 

Jon’s sudden, dragging stop sounds loudly in the empty of the streets. He pulls out his phone. 

He hadn’t thought it was a danger day. He hadn’t thought it was nearly so close. 

As he scrolls through his contacts list, the pressure in his head builds, sudden and sharp and nearly blinding in its intensity. Jon winces. 

He fed, hadn’t he? Recently. He can’t remember when exactly. Statement of Craig Goodall, regarding his explorations of an abandoned chicken and kebab shop. He had a run in with Tom Haan. Jon had had half a mind to go looking for Haan, but the takeaway had long since burned down and he hadn’t any other leads to go on. He had been doing some follow up and… 

He got hungry. And he went for a walk. 

Jon blows a long, slow breath out of his nose. He holds his phone tighter in his grip. 

Slip ups… happen. Sometimes. He hasn’t had one in a bit. The important thing is that he caught himself hunting before he finished the hunt. He just. Needs to be picked up. Go back to his Archives before he does anything stupid. He can’t be wherever... here... is. 

The Eye staunchly refuses to tell him, pain jabbing sharply at the place behind his left eye. Instead, a building flashes through his mind, all glass and marble and bright, glittering lights. There is something inside. Jon aches to know what it is.

It doesn’t matter. Perfectly normal people can figure out where they are without the help of an invasive, malevolent entity tracking their every move. They simply use their cellphones. Jon flicks over to the map function. 

Jon sees the building again, but this time its arching glass edifice is darkened, and its doors are shuttered and locked. 

It takes Jon a moment to realize he’s standing before it. 

When had he started walking again? He thought he had stopped, had decided to wait, to call for help, but--no, he had started walking again. There had been a tugging in his gut. He had been so close. 

There is something inside this building. It’s eldritch, and dreadful, and _hidden._ Jon needs to know what it is. He hardly notices as his footsteps begin to thud on the vacant, silent street once more. He does notice, however, as he rounds the building, heading to the back entrance he Knows has a faulty alarm. 

He slips his phone back into his pocket. On the screen, the map function remains open, a solitary blue dot slowly rounding the corner of Bow Street, Covent Garden. 

**~*~**

[CLICK]

[SOUNDS OF LIGHT BREATHING]

ARCHIVIST

There’s a door. Deep under the building. I had to walk down a back staircase in order to find it, and it’s mostly hidden in an alcove. It’s metal and old, and there’s a chain meant to lock its handle to a loop drilled into the adjoining wall. It’s already been cut. 

This is the door to the second Theatre Royal. There is something inside. I--I don’t quite Know what. 

[A LONG PAUSE]

I’m… not going in there.

[FOOTSTEPS BEGIN TO WALK BRISKLY AWAY.]

[FABRIC SHIFTS. THE SOFT TAPPING NOISES OF JON TYPING ON HIS PHONE]

[STATIC SWELLS SHARPLY]

There’s someone inside. 

[FOOTSTEPS STOP ABRUPTLY]

He is not from London. He only came to see the theatre. He cut the chains hours ago, and he opened the doors, and he stepped inside, and he never came out again. 

His name is Daniel. He prefers Danny. 

He isn’t from London. He’s staying with his brother while he’s in town. His brother is waiting for him. 

[A LONG, HEAVY SIGH]

 _(With feeling)_ Shit. 

[FOOTSTEPS BEGIN AGAIN]

[THE DOOR CREAKS SOFTLY. A MOMENT LATER, THERE IS THE SOUND OF IT SHUTTING.]

[FAINT SOUNDS OF A BRIGHT, CHEERFUL TUNE BEGIN TO PLAY]

**~*~**

ROLES

JOSEPH GRIMALDI, the hero

DANIEL STOKER, the pilgrim

ARCHIVIST, the interloper

THE EYE, the villain

ACT ONE

_A melody is heard, played by someone who does not exist on an instrument that is not real. It is beautiful. The curtain has long since risen. It had never set. It never would. The show must go on._

_Before us waits the stage of the second Theatre Royal. Its marble shines, as clean and white as the day of the theatre’s first opening. There is no mark of the fire which destroyed this building._

_The stage is bright and ornamented, almost glittering, with dazzling lights and banners in colors that should not be seen by human eyes and the gleam of sticky red blood beneath an ever-roaming spotlight. It is opening night. It has been opening night for a very, very long time._

_In the center of the stage dances JOSEPH GRIMALDI, the hero. Its knees do not bend in the manner most commonly ascribed to humans, which is fitting, because it can no longer be described as such._

_Beneath him lays DANIEL STOKER, the pilgrim, prone before the glory of all that Is Not._

STOKER: [ _weeping_ ] Please stop.

GRIMALDI: There isn’t such a thing. 

_The dance spirals, splatters like paint, and it no longer dances alone. It had never been dancing alone. There is no such thing as never. There is no such thing as time._

STOKER: [ _crying harder_ ] I don’t understand. 

GRIMALDI, in a voice almost identical to that of STOKER’S, though slightly to the left: There isn’t such a thing. 

_GRIMALDI smiles through thin red lips, revealing an echoing blackness behind his grin. A line of red dribbles from the corner of its mouth and down its chin. STOKER mimics the action, tears glistening on his cheeks. The music swells, reaching its crescendo._

STOKER: I want to go home. 

GRIMALDI, in a voice recognizable to STOKER, though no one in the audience: There isn’t such a thing. 

_Enter ARCHIVIST, the interloper, stage right. He climbs steps which had disappeared moments after STOKER first mounted them, right as the music had first begun to swell, right as the spotlight lit the place on the stage where our hero waited for his newest pilgrim. The steps fluctuate messily, reality flickering like a bulb before all that Is Not._

ARCHIVIST, softly: Hello, Mr. Grimaldi. I was wondering if I might have a word. 

_THE EYE, the villain, opens directly above the stage, bringing with it an awful, oozing reality, dripping over our hero in sticky, dribbling clumps. The music crashes to a halt in a sudden, discordant cacophony. A deathly silence falls over the stage. The colors, the light, the_ beauty _spirals and stutters to a standstill. In the hand of the interloper, a tape recorder softly clicks._

_A great, swelling pressure fills the second Theatre Royal as the power of our hero and the interloper grapple, all that Is Not and all that Is clashing in a violent haze._

_All at once, the pressure disappears. Our hero stands frozen on the stage, pinned beneath the hideous glare of THE EYE. ARCHIVIST takes a step closer. Its eyes are narrowed, and in the dim of the now-darkened stage, they almost shine._

ARCHIVIST, hungry: Statement of some of the scraps of Joseph Grimaldi, regarding his dismantling and subsequent reassembly by The Circus of the Other. Statement taken directly from subject, 28th of August 2013. Statement begins. 

**~*~**

Beneath the haze of the statement, Jon is aware of Danny Stoker behind him, collapsed against the filthy, dusty marble of Theatre Royal’s decrepit stage. He is aware of him panting, aware of his sobbing, gulping breaths and aware of the danger he is still in. 

He needs to run, Jon knows, and he Knows. He cannot run until the Archivist has taken his Statement. 

The words fall from a tongue that had not originally belonged to Joseph Grimaldi, one after another, and the Archivist swallows them the moment they touch the air. He had torn this Statement from the mouth of the thing that is not wholly Joseph Grimaldi, but is not wholly Not Joseph Grimaldi. He had ripped it from it like a champagne cork, but once the first word breached its lips, the rest had flowed easily enough.

They always do. People always want to tell their tale to the Archivist, even when they are not, in the strictest sense, people. 

Behind him, Danny Stoker huffs another ragged, painful breath. Jon cannot help him. Jon can only watch, and listen, and consume. 

The last word leaves Grimaldi’s lips, and its mouth closes as if on a hinge. There is an odd weight in the air, an expectation, like the moment before a balloon pops. 

“Statement ends,” says the Archivist. 

The Eye’s glare lifts, settling back over Jon and Jon alone. It wraps around his shoulders like an old, heavy coat, familiar, content. 

Grimaldi contorts its neck, bending it sharply as its head stares at Jon, nearly inverted. Its mouth slides open in a red, hellish grimace. 

“Um,” says Jon. He coughs slightly, and becomes uncomfortably aware of the empty distance between them. “Thank you for your time?”

Without breaking eye contact, Grimaldi bends forward, contorting its midsection unnaturally to keep its head staring outward and up, towards Jon. Its legs swing around in a large, showman’s arc, setting the orientation of its lower body to right with its upper. For a moment, it pauses there, back arched, perched on its hands and feet on a stage rapidly returning to a shining marble white. 

It scuttles directly towards Jon. 

Jon books it. 

_“Run!”_

Danny Stoker, it seems, needs no further instruction. He catches one glimpse of Grimaldi’s unnaturally fast crawl and rolls to his feet. 

In the distance, the music begins anew. What had once been a beautiful, seamless tune had since shattered, however, and its discordant crashing slices painful through Jon’s ears. There is a violence to the tune, the clatter, the awful, shrieking song. 

Overhead, the spotlight flickers back to life. It sweeps haphazardly over the stage, spiraling, erratic. 

Danny slams to a stop at the stage’s edge. “Where are the stairs?”

Jon very nearly rams into his back. “I don’t think they exist anymore.”

Nodding once, Danny says, “Lovely,” and he jumps. 

Jon hazards a glance behind him. A porcelain white face stares angrily back, only a few scant meters away. 

Without a moment’s hesitation more, he jumps. 

The wind knocks out of him slightly as he lands into the waiting arms of Danny Stoker, already on his feet and turned to the stage. With an assured ease, Danny sets him on his feet. 

“Thanks,” says Jon, surprised.

“Don’t mention it,” says Danny, slightly breathless.

They look towards the stage. Grimaldi perches at its edge, watching them. 

“He can’t get down without stairs, can he?” asks Danny. 

Grimaldi immediately begins to scurry down the stage’s edge like a spider. 

“Oh, of course he fucking can,” Danny groans, and he grabs Jon’s arm in one hand before yanking them both down the center aisle. 

Danny Stoker is… much faster than Jonathan Sims. He nearly pulls Jon’s arm out of his socket as he drags them along, but he doesn't slow, and he doesn’t let go. 

Behind them, Jon can hear the odd, uneven thudding of Grimaldi’s pursuit.

Danny pulls them down a row of seats, keeping a tight grip on Jon’s arm until they’ve spilled out onto the left side aisle. Licking his lips, he glances to the back left, wincing against the awful shine of the house lights.

“I think the door is this way,” he says, uncertain, before glancing towards the right. “Or maybe…?”

“Door doesn’t exist anymore,” says Jon, gasping for breath. 

_“What?”_

Reality shudders apart around them, falling into the Stranger’s domain once more. Jon knows there isn’t much longer before more and more of what is Known and Understood is lost to that which Is Not, before they lose more stubborn fictions like distance and time. 

If they don’t find a way out before then, then Grimaldi will catch them. Jon would rather not experience what comes after that. 

His jaw set tightly, Danny glances about, desperate and searching. He looks back towards Jon, then slightly past him, back towards where they came. 

His eyes widen. _“Look out!”_

Jon dives forward. He isn’t fast enough. 

Grimaldi’s hand catches him by the exposed part of his ankle.

And Jon’s skin _rips._

With a scream, he pitches forward, skin tearing like a tissue in Grimaldi’s grip. Pain lances up his leg like fire, and Jon falls, slamming into the theatre floor shoulder-first. 

_“Shit!”_ screams Danny.

He rushes forward, and for a moment, Jon thinks that he’s coming to Jon. He isn’t. He gears up like a soccer player, swinging his leg around in a smooth, controlled arc. 

Then, he kicks Grimaldi square in the face. 

There is a sound not unlike an egg cracking, if the egg were evil and sentient and also trying to rip the skin from Jon’s body. 

Grimaldi falls backwards, a surprised look on its face. Danny snatches up Jon with all the ease of a parent grabbing their errant child before making a break down the side aisle. 

_“Shit shit shit shit shit,”_ chants Danny. Behind them, Grimaldi lets out a roar, furious and shrill. _“Where is the exit?”_

Jon stumbles at his side, arm draped over Danny’s shoulders, with his good foot barely managing to touch the ground from the height difference. He tries to blink away the tears, the pain, and he tries to See a way out. 

It’s… difficult, when he’s actually in other Entities. Jon tries to avoid it as best he can. The Eye is more distant when he’s in another seat of power. Insulated. If there’s something the Eye wants, then there’s a good chance of breaking through. 

When the Eye has already gotten what it wanted to know, however… 

At his waist, Danny’s hand tightens. His step picks up. 

“There’s a door,” he says, relieved. He drags Jon along quicker, staring at a wall at the other end of the auditorium.

Jon follows his gaze. 

The door in question is settled into the wall’s face much in the same way a bear trap is settled onto a forest floor. It is a bright, cheerful yellow. 

Jon jerks backwards. It doesn’t so much as slow Danny. 

_“Stop.”_

_“Why on earth would we stop?”_

“That door doesn’t exist!”

_“Stop saying things don’t exist!”_

More insistently, Jon tugs backwards. Danny slows but does not stop, glancing warily behind them both. 

Jon can feel Grimaldi gaining. Like an itch in his mind. 

“That door could eat us,” insists Jon, desperately casting about for another way out. “It’s not the clown, but it’s not very nice.”

“Okay,” says Danny, in the patient tone of someone rapidly losing their shit. “So the clown _doesn’t_ want to eat us?”

“Um,” says Jon, reassuringly. 

Danny groans. _“So both will eat us?”_

“It’s more potential eating,” admits Jon. “They could do other things too.”

They reach the door. Behind them, Grimaldi draws nearer still. 

“Right,” says Danny, half words, half hysterical laugh. He glances at the door, then back behind him. “I don’t have a fucking clue anymore. Is this a better the devil we know thing or…?”

“Uh,” says Jon. He glances behind them. They have maybe fifteen, twenty seconds before Grimaldi catches up, and that’s only if time and space hold together for that long. “Excellent question.”

(Twelve seconds.)

_“Are you serious right now?”_

“I know both of these devils,” hisses Jon, “and neither of them like me very much.” 

(Seven seconds. Jon can see the white of Grimaldi’s sharp, sharp teeth.)

“Shit,” says Jon. _“Take the door, take the door!”_

Danny lunges forward. The door handle turns easily beneath his hand, and he drags them both through. 

And they fall into darkness. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank y'all so much for reading! I adore each and everyone one of you. Y'all make me smile so, so wide.
> 
> Reminder, I will be jumping around in the timeline a bit, but I'll be including a date marker in every single summary heading to keep things from getting too confusing. 
> 
> This chapter is a lot shorter than the other two by a decent amount, but I'm playing with the idea of shorter chapters with more frequent updates. Let me know if y'all preferred the longer chapters with less frequent updates.


	4. deliveries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2013\. 
> 
> Jon and Danny take a fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is very late, and I am very sorry. I had a bad case of writer's block that affected pretty much all the writing in my life, and unfortunately my actual school assignments had to take priority. But it's here, and the next chapter should hopefully be up a lot sooner!

Jon knows that Michael hasn’t decided to kill him yet simply because he lives long enough to land. 

The surface beneath him gives the moment it takes their weight, creaking and bouncing under them both, and Jon lands on something hard and warm. Pain stabs upwards, lancing through his heel and up his calf like a poker jabbed firm and deep, and for a moment, all Jon can see are spots. 

The something-hard, something-warm beneath him spasms violently. 

Oh. That’s a person. That’s very much a person. Jon rolls off of him, groaning. 

The person does not seem to appreciate this enough to not whack at him forcibly. He swears with almost the same amount of violence as he uses to thrash at them before swinging wildly at Jon, the hit landing somewhere south of his hip. 

The pain nearly sends him crashing into unconsciousness all over again. 

_ “Who the fu--Danny?”  _ The person shoots upright. “Danny, what the  _ fuck?”  _

In the back of Jon’s mind, a wave hammers at a door with hinges nearly burst. The ocean seeps through, always eager, always rising, higher and higher and higher.

_ Timothy Stoker,  _ it tells him, sultry and thick and so very, very pleased.  _ Daniel Stoker’s older brother.  _

It also tells him: 

Corporate job, publishing, halfway up the corporate ladder and good at climbing but not entirely certain he wants to. Tells himself he likes the work, is  _ good  _ at the work, but is never happier than when he’s far, far away from the office, deep in the woods or halfway up a mountain. Proud of his appearance, takes care of it, almost as much of his brother, and Grimaldi will be more than happy to skin him too--

(Jon can still hear the music, not at all faint, not at all gone.)

He bolts upright.  _ “Door,”  _ he chokes out.  _ “Danny, door--” _

Above the bed of Timothy Stoker, there waits an open yellow door, faintly illuminated by the barest tendrils of the breaking dawn. Through it, Jon can see Grimaldi, running, getting closer,  _ lunging-- _

_ “Shit!”  _ screeches Danny, and he wrenches himself on the bed, catching the door with the corner of his foot and kicking it shut. 

It bounces off Grimaldi’s forehead. 

_ “Shit shit shit,”  _ says Danny, quite appropriately. He surges forward, catching the door right as swings open again, and he slams towards the wall with all his weight. 

It does not close. Instead, it hovers dangerously open, an inch-and-a-half of space and growing. At the door’s edge, a brittle white hand creeps through the door’s mouth, grabbing it at its corner and digging into its surface with sharp, black nails. 

Danny’s feet scrabble for purchase against the sheets.  _ “Tim!” _

“Oh  _ fuck,”  _ says Tim, and he lunges forward. 

He comes up by his brother, scrabbling for purchase against the whorled yellow of the door’s face. Together, they manage to force it an inch closed.

A massive thud rocks the door violently open again, two inches and growing. Tim slips on the bed covers, nearly losing his grip entirely and giving another quarter of an inch to Grimaldi’s onslaught. 

Another hand grips the wall beneath the door. It digs into the plaster, splintering it beneath the weight of its fingertips.

Jon says, “I See you.”

His voice is soft, barely there, more breath than voice. But as the words breach his lips, a pressure builds in the room, like the cabin in an airplane, like a deep, deep ocean, like the moment before a cork is popped. 

The Eye opens. It Looks at Grimaldi, at his face in the door gap, at his hands and his claws. 

Its voice box belonged to a man named Alexander Simpson. Its skin belonged to a woman named Sarah Baldwin, and a man named Joseph Grimaldi, and a man named Andrew Hastings, and a woman named Whitney Shellstein. 

Whitney had been a baker. She preferred numbers, and wanted to study them in school, but she hadn’t the funds for tuition and hadn’t the time to study besides, not with how long her hours were. She had a backache the night that the Anglerfish took her. She had spent so long kneading dough, so long on her feet, so long dragging around tray after tray of fresh, toasty bread that she couldn’t have given less of a shit about. She hated the hours that were both early and long, and she hated the way she always had flour beneath her fingers, and she hated that she would have to be back in less than nine hours to do it all again. All she could think about was how her feet hurt, and how much she wanted her bad, and how very badly she needed a cigarette--

The sound that Grimaldi makes could not be described as human by any stretch of the world. It screeches shrill and loud and  _ angry,  _ too inhuman, too  _ wrong  _ to possibly be the voice that once belonged to Alexander Simpson. 

Grimaldi wrenches itself back, out of the doorway, out of the room, out of the Eye’s terrible glare. Its hands disappear through the gap, back into the safety of its own realm. 

The door slams shut beneath the Stoker brothers’ weight. 

Not a moment later, the wall smoothens, the yellow frame melting away into the pale blue of the wall’s surface. 

For a moment, Danny flattens his hands against the wall, blinking. He pulls back slightly. 

“It’s… just a wall.”

Tim pants at his side, hair still mussed from sleep. “What the  _ fuck  _ was that?”

“I don’t--there was a door here.” Danny starts to tremble. “Wasn’t there?”

“Was that a-- _ clown?”  _ demands Tim, glancing wildly between Danny and the place where the door once was. “Danny, what just happened?”

“I think--” Danny settles back on his heels, staring at the wall. He turns a startling white. “I think it wanted to eat me.”

_ “What?” _

Jon glances to the door. Not locked, could probably make it in two, three strides. The bed is well made, quality, not the kind that squeals much. He could make it out the door before they remembered he was ever here. 

People… don’t react well. As a general rule. To the supernatural, and to challenges to their worldview, and to things trying to eat them. Sometimes, they’ll lash out at whatever’s closest and Jon, well. Jon tends to have an unfortunate habit of standing too close. 

He doesn’t have any interest in sitting around and answering questions, besides. None of his answers are ones he particularly likes, and they wouldn’t do the Stokers any good.

“It was… going to eat me,” says Danny Stoker, slow and thoughtful, like he’s only now realizing it himself. “It-- _ really  _ wanted to. I could… feel it. I stepped up on that stage and I  _ knew  _ I had fucked up somehow. But the music had started before I could make it back to the stairs, and then there  _ weren’t  _ any stairs, and then I was in center stage and that-- _ thing  _ was there and it was so  _ hungry.” _ His voice picks up, unraveling like a thread, and his breath quickens in time. “It wanted  _ me,  _ all of me, every little bit as a prop in that  _ fucking show,  _ and it would show me every step of the dance that I would step myself were it not for--”

Danny stops. His voice sharpens back into focus, back into now. 

“--were it not for you.”

Jon rapidly remembers that both of these brothers were faster than him, and also stronger, and also taller, and also he might be missing a foot, he forgot to check if he still had that. 

He glances down. Still there. A bloody mess, but still there. Wonderful. He loves it when he still has those important little bits. 

“Um,” says Jon, with exactly the amount of confidence he feels could be expected from him. 

Tim shifts on the bed, pale and drawn, and his eyes dart from Jon to his brother and back again. 

“Who’s this?” He looks back at his brother. “Danny?” 

“I don’t know,” says Danny. His hands come up to drag down his face, to cover his mouth. “I don’t--” 

He hiccups, once, then again, then again. All at once, he begins to laugh, ragged, broken. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs, like everything is funny, or like nothing is. Tim reaches a hand out. He grabs him by the shoulder, steadying him with a face of open worry. 

Danny’s laugh morphs into horrible, gulping sobs. “I don’t know what just happened,” he says, shaking, and he tugs at his hair with one hand. “I really fucking don’t.” 

“Danny--” Tim wraps his arms around Danny’s shoulders, pulling him tightly to his chest. “It’s alright, I--I’m here now, understand? Nothing’s--nothing’s going to  _ eat  _ you.”

“Except for the clown,” gasps Danny, half-laughing again. “And the door, and-- _ fuck _ knows what’s else, at this point.” 

Tim holds him tighter. “That’s not--I won’t  _ let it,  _ I won’t--I--Danny, what  _ was  _ that?”

Well. Now Jon feels awkward. 

It’s well, it’s a very touching sibling moment. An intimate moment. Full of. Emotions. And the sort. And he’s just there. Sitting. On the bed.

Jon pats the exposed bit of Danny’s knee, because, well, it rather feels like the thing he’s supposed to do in this sort of situation. With comfort. And the like. 

He really prefers the situations where he can just leave the victims at the nearest McDonald’s and call it a day. 

Jon clears his throat. “That’s uh--I wouldn’t uh. Worry. Too much. These things do happen. It’s probably best not to dwell on it.”

Danny stops crying. He pulls back from Tim’s embrace, just slightly. Both of them turn to stare at Jon. 

That was probably the wrong thing to say, come to think of it. 

Danny says, “He tried to  _ eat  _ me.”

“But he didn’t,” says Jon, helpfully. 

_ “He tried to eat me.”  _

“Yes, well.” Jon coughs slightly. “Nothing to be done for it now. Avoid the architecture of Robert Smirke, alright? And clowns. And it would be best if you never went to another circus again. And, uh, if you start to hear, uh, odd music, like a calliope organ, I would recommend moving to another, well, continent.” He nods, once, to himself. “That should be it.”

“Move to another continent?” parrots Danny, faintly. 

He looks a bit pale, and a bit like he’s going to collapse, which are both normal, healthy reactions to this sort of thing, Jon finds. 

“America, if possible. Wonderful place. Almost absolute anarchy there. You can buy a gun in a grocery store. Does wonders to help the life expectancy in these sorts of things.” He nods, again, not because he thinks it adds anything to the situation, but rather because he has no idea what to do with his extremities in general. With a pained wince, he swings his legs from the bed and lets them dangle over the edge. “Right then. I’ll be off.”

“I--are you  _ leaving?”  _ asks Tim, incredulous. He half-turns to face him. 

Jon frowns. “Was there something else?”

_ “Something just tried to eat my brother!”  _ The bed rocks beneath them as Tim leans forward, gesturing wildly toward the wall above his headboard. “A-- _ magic door  _ spat you both out on my bed, which, last time I checked,  _ super fucking wasn’t Covent Garden.” _

“Yes, well, that’s rather passed,” says Jon, a bit frustrated. “Not much to be done now. Be careful, trust your instincts, don’t go near any taxidermists or wax museums. Invest in a weapon. It’s remarkably easy to buy an axe in Central London. Hopefully Grimaldi will forget you were there, or I’ll have sufficiently annoyed him to the point where he doesn’t care anymore. I’ll be dealing with them soon.” 

He scowls down at his leg, a bit hazy, a bit frazzled. Blood drips down the side of his foot, splattering on Tim’s carpet below. He bought it on sale, in a shop on the east side of London, which went out of business three years ago from a sudden dip in funds. One of the employees had been draining the coffers, so to speak, but the owner had never realized, not even when he took out the key to the front door and locked it for the last time, hands shaking as he did. The key had dangled from a yellow fob. He had bought it from a gas station for thirty-five cents. 

Another sharp burst of pain wrenches its way through him. 

Jon sighs. He’s so tired. He can’t remember when he last slept. He can’t remember a lot, nowadays, and it scares him so damn much. It’s hard to bring himself to care much about what happens next for the Stoker brothers, and that scares him more than the forgetting. 

He’s tired. He wants to rest. 

It’s not that he’s not sympathetic. Or, at least, he doesn’t think it’s that. It’s just that, relatively speaking, they’re getting off rather light. There’s some trauma, granted, but Danny kept his skin. Tim didn’t get much past a rude awakening and a stained carpet. Neither of them died, and neither of them suffered worse. 

Answers won’t help them. Getting involved in this world won’t help them. What they need to do is to move on and forget, and be grateful that that’s an option to them. 

“Look, I--” he sighs again, heavier this time. “There’s not much to be done, alright? It’s already past. You’re too much effort to go after now that you’ve left their hunting grounds, and they’re far more likely to come after me than you. That’s liable to change if you do something stupid like ask questions which, I assure you, you do not want the answers to. The best thing you can do is just turn around and keep walking. Don’t go looking for answers, don’t ask questions,  _ and do not get the authorities involved.  _ I know it may be a bit uncomfortable for some to just pretend it never happened, but it gives you your best chances. The people who make it out of these things are the people who run.”

_ “You  _ didn’t run,” Danny points out.

“I actually did a great deal of running just now, and you were there for all of it,” says Jon, pointed, and he gingerly tests some weight on his foot. 

He nearly throws up on Tim’s lovely white carpeting. A bit of blood seeps out from beneath it, clotting the threads. 

Tim drags a hand through his hair. “Look, how about we just call you an ambulance, get some help--”

“Nope,” says Jon, immediately, wrenching himself off the comforter and staggering a step towards the door, half turning to the bed as he speaks. “Absolutely not. I’m not bothering with any  _ waste of time hospital--” _

He doesn’t say anything more, nor does he move any closer to the door, but that is not from a lack of desire to do either. Rather, it is more due to the way the world lurches suddenly around him, and the way all the blood drains from his face, and the way pain lances upwards and through him, white and blinding and altogether too much. 

“Ah,” he says, and he faints dead away. 

**~*~**

Danny catches the man before he lands. 

Danny had always been quick, even as a child. He had made his way through a revolving carousel of sports growing up, from gymnastics to martial arts to rugby, and he had excelled at all of them. Danny is strong, and fast, and shines so goddamn bright that it aches to look at sometimes, and he manages to wrench himself off the bed quickly enough that the man never lands. 

Tim’s quilts are soaked in blood. So is his carpet, and so is the man’s pant leg, and so is his foot. 

Tim very nearly vomits when he catches sight of it. 

“Shit,” says Danny, immediately settling him back on Tim’s bed. He doesn’t so much as stir. “That doesn’t look good.” 

Tim scrambles off his mattress, moving around to where his foot lies. “First aid kit,” he says. “Bathroom.” 

Danny nods once, his face wane. He leaves the room without a word. 

Tim leans over, flicking on the bedside lamp. The room is dimly lit, the first light of daybreak easing its way through the half-cracked blinds, and he feels he’s going to need proper light before dealing with this. 

Tim sucks in a sharp breath when he sees it. 

Tim did time on a search and rescue team. A while back, during a winter break in uni. He got a place on a team in a nice mountain range, and he saw all manner of gory fuck ups in his sort tenure. Bones through skin, torn up limbs, blood-and-gore, the whole shebang. 

Part of the skin on Jon’s leg looks like it’s just been… pulled off. Like a torn wrapper. 

Beneath the man’s foot, Tim’s comforter stains a dark, pooling red. 

“Got it,” says Danny, rushing back in. He shoves the kit at Tim. A moment later, he yanks a few of Tim’s water bottles out of his pockets. “Also some fresh water.” 

Tim accepts them without looking, setting to work about treating the injury. “Did you call 999?”

Danny doesn’t answer. 

Tim frowns. He glances at Danny out of the corner of his eye. “Danny?”

“He said not to.”

(Danny’s shaking. He won’t meet his eyes.)

“Yeah, well, he also fainted from pain a second later,” says Tim, more than a little testy. “He needs a hospital.” 

“You weren’t there,” says Danny. He doesn’t take his eyes off the man. “He knew what he was doing.”

“It doesn’t matter what he knows, Danny,” says Tim, pursing his lips. “He needs a doctor.”

“He knew  _ everything,”  _ insists Danny. “About the clown, about the stairs, even about that weird door. I still don’t understand most of it. What if there’s a reason he doesn’t want to go to the hospital?”

“That reason isn’t going to give him a  _ blood transfusion.”  _

“What if there’s a reason he doesn’t want the authorities involved?” Danny looks at him with wide, haunted eyes. “What if that lets them…  _ find us…  _ somehow?”

“An evil, spooky clown isn’t going to be watching the hospitals.”

“You don’t  _ know that.”  _ Danny’s hands shake. He looks down at the man, at the blood. “I can’t explain this. I can’t explain any of this.”

“We’ll tell them he got injured urban exploring, and you stumbled on him,” soothes Tim. He shifts his grip on the man’s foot to better staunch the blood. “No more, no less. He’ll probably back you up when he wakes up.”

“That’s not a normal wound,” Danny insists, jabbing a finger at the man’s foot. “Have you ever seen  _ anything  _ like that?”

Tim hasn’t. They both know it. 

“They’re going to take one look at that thing and  _ know  _ something is weird. They’ll call the police. And then… what? I don’t know! Because  _ I don’t know why he doesn’t want us to go to the authorities.  _ What if it’s something bad?” 

Tim presses his lips into a thin white line. “He could go into shock.” 

“He got me out of there alive,” says Danny, and he stares at the man’s face with a haunted, vacant look. “I don’t know how. He did-- _ something-- _ to do it. Something weird. I don’t know how to explain it.” He looks back at Tim, wane and frightened. “He might have a reason for not wanting us to go to the police. I don’t want to risk that unless we have to.”

Danny casts a single pale glance to the space above the bed, where the door opened, where they fell out. Tim follows his gaze. 

The wall is smooth, and plain, and there isn’t a door to be found. There isn’t a clown. 

Tim looks back at Danny, 

(There is very, very little that Tim Stoker wouldn’t do for his brother.)

“Help me patch him up,” says Tim, sighing. “The  _ second  _ that he takes a turn for the worst, we call an ambulance.”

**~*~**

The man’s name is Jonathan Sims.

He finds ID in his pocket, in a wallet with a single credit card and three different types of currency, all crumpled and in negligible amounts. It’s not an official ID, but rather the cheap laminate sort you get for work, chipped and flaking at the edges. 

He works for the Magnus Institute, it reads. London. 

“Have you ever heard of that?” asks Tim, frowning. “The Magnus Institute?”

Danny glances up. He had been pacing the distance of Tim’s bedroom, from the dresser to the headboard and back again, casting worried glances towards Jonathan Sims every few feet. His brow furrows, incredulous. “There’s  _ no way  _ that he’s from the Magnus Institute.”

“So you’ve heard of it?”

“Do you remember my haunted house phase?”

Tim stares at him. 

Danny shrugs. “Didn’t last long, but got pretty deep in the community. You know--famous hauntings, the supernatural, cryptids, all that. Went through all the leaderboards and discord channels. Every little fringe group I could find. There was only one thing they ever agreed on, and that was that the Magnus Institute was a total joke.”

Tim frowns down at the ID. “It says it’s a research center for the paranormal.”

“Their records got leaked or something.” Danny shrugs. “Couldn’t find many of those--they got taken down a while back, for the violation of something or other. Most of them were stoner claims or pretty obvious crank statements. Nothing real.”

Tim stares back down at the man on the bed. 

He never went into shock. 

He had been expecting it. Anticipating it. Waiting on pins and needles, phone in hand, for the moment where he needed to call it, to get him help before this strange man died on his bed. A single signal of distress that meant he was going south. 

His heart rate stabilized before Tim even thought to check it. His breathing evened out not long after they decided to let him rest. The blood flow even slowed, though it did not stop entirely. 

Tim has seen bad injuries. He’s seen what they do to people. Something as painful as his foot must be should have sent him into a discernible amount of stress. He shouldn’t just be… asleep. 

“Maybe they found something real,” says Tim, eventually, and he sets the ID back in the wallet, and he sets it back to the side. 

Danny doesn’t answer. He goes back to pacing. 

He pulls out a phone next, locked and without any notifications. A model from a few years back, too, so no fingerprint option. He sets that to the side as well. 

A pack of cigarettes comes out next, Royals, half-smoked. The cigarettes rattle and shift in the box softly as he turns the packaging over between his hands, frowning. The box was thin and shitty and tattooed with warnings on how smoking killed, and Tim could tell just by looking at them that they were the cheapest thing on the shelf. 

Huh. You’d think some sort of… magic… man… would be able to afford a better brand. 

After a few moments more of fishing around, he pulls out a gold lighter, engraved with an intricate web pattern. The design is finely etched in the heavy, cold edifice, with thin, branching arcs that Tim had trouble following with his eyes. He sets it aside.

The last thing he removes is a tape recorder. 

Tim blinks, surprised, because most people don’t carry tape recorders around in their pocket, and also his pocket hadn’t actually seemed large enough to keep a tape recorder in it. He can’t remember seeing one of these since he was very small, and he’s never seen one be lugged around on one’s person before. 

The red light is on. It’s still recording. 

Tim clicks it off. 

Something prickles at the back of his neck. Eyes, watching him, staring at him, hungry and unwavering, from the place behind his back. 

Tim snaps its head around. There is nothing there. 

He turns back to the man. The feeling of the eyes grows stronger. 

“He had that in there with him,” says Danny. “In the other place, that is.”

“In Covent Garden?”

“No,” says Danny. “It wasn’t Covent Garden.”

Tim sets it to the side. He turns fully to face his brother, dragging a hand through his hair. The eyes watch him do it. “You should get some sleep.”

Danny scoffs, squeezing his eyes tightly shut. His hands are shaking. Tim doesn’t think they ever stopped. “I’m not sleeping.”

“You need to rest. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

Danny looks at the space above Tim’s headboard again. He swallows, hard. 

“I see that thing,” he confesses, “every time I close my eyes.” 

Tim remembers that hand, white as bone, carving into the surface of that impossible door. Every time he has a moment where he flinches, considers it wasn’t real, he thinks about that hand.

“It’s gone now,” he tells him, trying for reassurance but coming out considerably weaker. 

“It could come back though.” He jabs a single hand to Jonathan Sims, still unmoving, still asleep. “You heard him. That thing could still get me.” 

“I won’t let it.” 

Danny looks at him, something sad and frightened and helpless. It takes Tim a moment to realize what exactly has taken home in his face. 

Tim is the older brother. Not just in age. In understanding. He was the fix-it brother, the brother who understood how things were done, the brother that helped when he didn’t understand paperwork or how to set up utilities in his first place or when he got in trouble again, sorry, Tim, but could you help me straighten things out? He can go to Tim because Tim had already done it before, and because Tim would help him, and because Tim always, always knew how to fix things. 

Danny doesn’t believe him. For the first time ever, he’s found a problem that his brother cannot solve. 

And the horrible thing is, Tim isn’t sure that he’s wrong. 

**~*~**

[CLICK]

[A DOOR OPENS, THEN CLOSES AGAIN. MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS GROW CLOSER. FURNITURE CREAKS SOFTLY.]

TIMOTHY STOKER

Finally got him down. Not that I think he’s going to stay down for long. He’s pretty worked up about all this. 

[A LONG PAUSE]

Right. Not like you’re going to answer.

[ANOTHER PAUSE, SHORTER. FURNITURE CREAKS AGAIN.]

What…  _ are  _ you?

You can’t be normal. I’m not dumb. You don’t get an injury like that and just  _ not react  _ past needing a  _ nap.  _

What was that you said?  _ I see you?  _ What does that even  _ mean?  _

[SILENCE STRETCHES OUT FOR SEVERAL MINUTES] 

I’m frightened.

This is--fucking  _ weird,  _ mate. I don’t even fully believe it happened, and it happened  _ above my bed.  _ I keep thinking about that weird hand, and about Danny--and--and--

_ (Petrified.)  _ I only saw its face for a second. It couldn’t have been real. 

Danny’s afraid. That it’s coming back. I’m afraid that it’s coming back. I don’t know how to stop something like that. I-- _ can  _ I stop something like that? Is it even possible? 

Can  _ you? _

[A HEAVY SIGH.]. 

I... don’t know why I’m even telling you all this. I guess I just need someone to talk to? 

[FABRIC SHIFTS. FURNITURE CREAKS.]

I… thought I turned that off. 

[FUMBLING, THE SOUND OF AIR MOVING.]

_ (Thoughtful.)  _ Danny said you had this on you during it all, didn’t he?

[CLICK]

**~*~**

Tim sits in silence, listening to the hollow click of the recorder. 

Its tape has long since run out. It hadn’t been particularly long--a few minutes of footsteps, an odd span of him fighting with the tape recorder, and then the event itself. The music. The footsteps. 

The statement. 

Tim shudders thinking about it. He had wanted to turn it off, when he heard it. He had tried, even. It was too horrible, to  _ strange,  _ and he had wanted to click the recorder off, to throw it against the wall, to get that awful, grating tone to  _ stop talking-- _

His hand had remained in his lap, and he hadn’t been able to move it for the life of him. The fear, it had been… paralyzing. 

(They taught him to dance, the ringmaster and his men, they taught that shambling little man to stitch himself apart with music and step as his needle and thread. Not together, Archivist,  _ apart,  _ you could never understand, not as you are, pinned beneath that wretched Watcher like a moth mounted, chained like a dog to falsehoods like reality and truth. That sad little clown had been holding himself together for  _ months  _ before he found his home in the Circus, covering the holes of his pitiful self with patches of drink and sorrow and empty, meaningless things, until he was nothing but a sack of sick and skin and yawning  _ nothingness,  _ and they, we,  _ we _ showed him how to spin until he splattered, how skin was a cage best ripped off. 

He danced straight beneath the costumier’s knife, Archivist, and he made such lovely screams and sobs and mewling pleas until the pieces of him that cared had been carved away. 

He understood then, they did, he did,  _ it  _ did, and he-they-it learned the lesson so very well that it was taught anew to the ringmaster and the costumier and all those bags of flesh, and all their wet, messy parts were stitched into different shapes, and those shapes danced, and they danced, and they danced.)

“You almost didn’t go in.”

The silence breaks like a promise. 

“You only went in because you knew Danny was in there. That means something, doesn’t it? That. That’ll you’ll help. Him. Me. Keep him safe.” 

Jonathan Sims does not answer. He does not even move.

Tim drags a hand down his face. He feels very, very tired, and very very old. 

(He doesn’t think to wonder who he was arguing with, before he went into the theatre.)

**~*~**

TIMOTHY STOKER

_ (Firm.)  _ You’re going to help him. You have to. 

[CLICK]

**~*~**

Breekon & Hope Deliveries

Package Pick-up & Delivery Request Form--Express Service

Requested By: An old friend ;)

Date Requested: now

Pick-Up Location:  space is a fiction you should know better than to entertain, but we have a nice scrap of skin for you to taste, and things like that have a way of finding their way home. You’ll find him. 

Delivery Location:  The Circus of the Other

Package Description:  A very, very naughty Archivist who interrupted some lovely fun, and the bit of fun himself--you’ll know its him, he has such pretty skin, good enough to  _ e a t _ .

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: @polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup
> 
> Come say hi!


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